Hello fellow selfhoster, I was wondering how important it is to have ECC Memory. I want a server that is really reliable and ECC memory pops up as one of the must haves for reliability. But it seems to me in my research that it is quite expensive to get a setup with ECC memory. How important is ECC memory for a server (I rely on).
So far I have been rocking a Raspberry pi 4 which has ECC memory
If you’re using memory for storage operations, especially for something like ZFS cache, then you ideally want ECC so errors are caught and corrected before they corrupt your data, as a best practice.
In the real world unless you’re buying old servers off ebay that already have it installed the economics don’t make sense for self hosted. The issues are so rare and you should have good backups anyways. I’ve never run into a problem for not using ECC, been self hosting since 2010 and have some ZFS pools nearly that old. I exclusively run on consumer stuff with the exception of HBAs and networking, never had ECC.