And this is just the scariest single risk possible, there’s plenty of other risk out there. However, if you can get past the totalitarian tone of the thread, there is actually some good information in there about what could happen to your ZFS filesystem when the filesystem data gets corrupted by bad RAM. There is a discussion thread on the FreeNAS users’ forum covering ECC vs Non-ECC, in my opinion there’s not really an discussion at all in the thread and opposing opinions don’t seem to be either encouraged or welcome.

Add the lack of recovery tools for the ZFS file system out there and this becomes a catastrophic failure. Even more so for any ZFS filesystem like FreeNAS uses, bad RAM in ZFS could potentially do more than just corrupt a file or two, it could - and has - render the pool unmountable. In fact, for almost all things computing, ECC is a better choice. All things being equal, ECC is hands down the better choice. Let’s start off by clarifying a bit… In no way am I suggesting that ECC is an inferior choice to Non-ECC for FreeNAS.

It made sense for me to consolidate that down into its own article and refer to it in the future. In the comments alone of these blogs, I’ve probably written a couple different blogs’ worth of material about my thoughts on FreeNAS and ECC RAM. Since posting the first of my few NAS Build blogs, I’ve had a steady stream of informed, well-wishing people drop comments related to the fact that I had not selected ECC RAM for my personal build or any of my other different NAS Build suggestions.

What does non ecc memory mean