Okay, so I’m planing on building a home server out of my dumpster find PC. I grabbed a Erying cpu/motherboard combo along with a bunch of hard drives, 64gb ram, a HBA and 2.5gb nic. The plan is the install Proxmox, sutup my drives with zfs and then set up some VMs and LXCs for services plus one VM with PCIE pass through for a gaming vm. The only issue I foresee is with the ram. My erying board won’t support ecc, which from what I keep reading is a big no-no for zfs. Should I even bother with zfs if in don’t have ecc memory?
IMO no ECC is fine for home systems, just keep backups for data you care about. Memory corruption and HDD bitrot are actually quite uncommon, and it’s only when you have multiple machines that statistically you’re likely to start experiencing it. Besides that most home use cases are just caching data in RAM - chances are if there is any corruption it’ll disappear after a reboot and reread. Memory corruption is more scary when you’re dealing with databases or you’re doing lots of data updates, since corrupt memory is getting written back to disk more often.
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I agree mostly with what @cowphrase said here, except that ZFS is much like a database where it retains caches of critical file-system information in memory that if corrupted can corrupt things very quickly.
If you’re building a home budget ZFS server, i’d suggest you obtain a DDR3 era xeon platform, used, for cheap. DDR3 ECC is very affordable these days.
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My x9 Supermicro motherboard with an e3 xeon has been bulletproof for about 5 years. And only uses about 45 watts with 4 hard drives and a couple VMs.
Only downside is fan (non) control. I’m using a manual PWM knob to keep it quiet. But I found some scripts which can potentially do temp based fan throttling.
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