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Comment by PaywallBuster | Hacker News Reader

the budget option is < 800$ ?

Still quite a lot. All you really need is an old i7 and a 10GbE Mellanox Connect-X2 or Connect-X3 card from eBay for $10-20.

I agree with your message but it's hard to find an i7 that supports ECC RAM and the Mellanox Connect-X 2 has lost support in modern distros.

Best bet is to pick up an old HP Z620 of find someone who is upgrading their old Xeon homelab. Generally its a choice of cheap, quiet, energy efficient and you can only pick two of these options.

In my case, one of the main goals was quiet, which ruled out some decent used 1U servers I found at the recycler :(

Someday I'll have a proper closet but right now my rack is under the kitchen and my wife complains when the servers get above about 60 dB.

Yeah I live in a studio and quiet is hard. I am also fussy and don’t want anything that looks out of place.

I actually built my desktop as a near silent PC with the goal of it becoming my NAS when I upgrade but I didn’t understand the implications of running ZFS without ECC at the time.

FWIW I've run ZFS on my NAS since 2009, and I have had no detectable file corruption due to not using ECC. There might be something somewhere but it's not worse than other filesystems or anything in that regard.

So while I'd certainly sleep sounder with ECC on it, it's not a complete horror show like someone likes to portray it as.

Yes I guess it comes down to the likely hood of the RAM going bad without the user realising it.

I have had one stick give me issues over the last 10 years but that is out of probably 20 sticks.

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