Freenas when to prefer zfs upon soft raid

To begin with:
I have a consumer grade motherboard that I plan to use freenas with my current hardware.

What I know about zfs:
It is being propagated as the most robust fs currently to mankind, where ECC Ram is a must in order to enjoy that feature.

My questions:
To what extent is that true?
Has someone made a setup with the new amd ryzon cpus since their motherboards support ECC Ram with freenas.

I’m opening this topic not with the intent to start a religious war between the amd and intel fanboyz, I hope that we can keep the topic at a professional level.

Thank you for your input in advance.

ZFS DOES NOT require ECC, but any added redundancies or error correcting can only improve the systems survive-ability against failures.

This video covers just how hard it is to kill ZFS

And in this video I show a follow up on a system built on consumer hardware after running a few years on an AMD build (not Ryzen)

Hope that helps :wink:

That sounds quite encouraging. The videos propagate that you are totally fine when using non-ecc supporting hardware, and you basically won’t land in hell when using consumer grade hardware.
Would be great to see a follow up if a productive machine failes.

We have had some systems fail and we simply replaced the failed part and carry on, even if it is a motherboard. As long as you properly back up your FreeNAS (including the encryption keys if you choose to encrypt the drives) you can restore the pool on another system.