I recently spec’d a home NAS that I wanted to run TrueNAS Scale on. I got pretty exited once all the parts arrived and put it together only to realize that the Ryzen 5 5500GT APU doesn’t support ECC RAM. I remember having read that the non-Pro Ryzen APUs don’t support ECC RAM, but somehow I was under the impression that it should seeing how it’s used in the 45Drives HL8. Lesson learned.
Is there a way to salvage this build and get ECC support? From what I’ve heard the Ryzen non-APU chips are pretty bad regarding idle power consumption due to the separate IO die / chiplet design, whereas the APUs are monolithic designs with better idle power consumption.
To be honest, the 5500GT is way overkill for what I need. If I didn’t have the ECC requirement I would’ve opted for an Asus Prime N100I-D4 and a PicoPSU, way lower power consumption and probably fine for what I need.
i would grab a PRO series APU and call it good then. like a 3x00ge PRO, or a 5xx0ge PRO. NOTE there are a few 4xxx PRO series APUs that pop up on ebay occasionally but they are usually more expensive.
You can find used Ryzen 5xxx Pro APUs on Ebay for non ludicrous when I checked a week ago, so I wouldn’t call this a deal breaker if ECC is a hard requirement for you. Beware of Vendor Locking on these however as covered by STH: Lenovo Vendor Locking Ryzen CPUs with AMD PSB the Video
I believe your motherboard will also need to support the ECC UDIMMs, making this a bit more of a minefield to navigate.
My 1 year experience of an N100 based NAS (AsRock N100M) is that you don’t need ECC. I’ve been lucky? Maybe. Hope many more years will confirm my current experience.
Also using a pico PSU and has been working fine, no major issues or complaints.
If you really want it, as many suggested, you can get a Ryzen 5 Pro 4650G for 80 to 90$ and be set. You’ll then need to source the appropriate RAM and mobo to support ECC, but it’s a given. I’d return the 5500GT if you still can or re-sell it ASAP.
there is no requirement. Only recommendation. Linux doesn’t care and runs with any memory the CPU is comfortable with.
The question is…how do you know?
Otherwise get a 65W TDP CPU as you can further reduce TDP to 45W if needed. Those 65W AM4 CPUs are probably the least amount of Watts during load. All Ryzens have fairly high idle power consumption compared to Intel. 6 cores is plenty for your average homelab. Just get enough memory…because there is never enough memory.
Yes I’m aware that ECC is not a hard requirement, but I wanted to do it right with ECC.
How are you powering the pico PSU? With a laptop power brick or something else? I was considering getting one of the MeanWell 12V power supplies and an SFX back panel with an IEC connector (if that exists) to get a neater setup.
valid point. I wouldn’t run my servers without ECC. Doesn’t feel right without it and I like the systemlog on Proxmox and EDAC telling me stuff. And one less point of failure to worry about. Should be the default for all memory…but with Epyc 4004, ECC UDIMMs seem to be less than a stepchild they used to be. Lots of SKUs for DDR5 , including 5600MT/s, non-binary and stuff. good times…has been a lot worse a couple of years ago including questionable/rare board support.
No unrecoverable error has corrupted my files or any part of the system. Errors have surely appeared somewhere but they were recoverable down the stream instead of up the stream.
