Which SoC boards have ECC ram? ECC ram is essential for any reliable data storage system. Disks have built-in error correcting codes, and RAID can detect errors, but none of this helps if the data is corrupted in RAM before it ever reaches the disk.
For truly important files (photos), I’ll take the slight added expense of ECC for a little more peace of mind that old photos aren’t being gradually degraded with every resilver or scrub.
The specs claim "ECC" [0], but give no further details. ejolson on the Raspberry Pi forums [1] thinks it is on-die ECC, not traditional ECC, which would mean transfers between the RAM and the memory controller are not protected and there are no means of monitoring errors or triggering a kernel panic if there's an uncorrectable error. Some discussion on Reddit [2] also suggests it's on-die ECC. If this is true, it's better than nothing but still not a replacement for a NAS with traditional ECC RAM.
In that case I incorrectly thought (like the other forum posters) it was like DDR5 on-die ECC. What you describe is better than DD5 on-die ECC. Is this error reporting supported by Linux? Is there some way I can do fault injection (e.g. undervolting the RAM) to check it's working?
