I used a Xeon desktop from July 2012 to November 2018

Yes ecc makes a different for gaming, it makes gaming slower

I have a Xeon E3 in my homeserver

it's p nice

Ecc is not about perf, it's about stability

I would not run a server or video/audio rendering without it

at least the important stuff

It depends what you do on the server

Most use cases don't actually require or even benefit from ecc

Data storage, serving movies via Plex

What kind of raid level?

I use FreeNAS w/raidz2

@porco single core perf does

6 3tb wd reds

Then ECC brings a benefit

But only because of the raidz2

Everything else that you said has 0 benefits from ECC

yeah I have to. so many lifehacker tier guides said "just pick up old pc parts and smash them together" and FreeNAS forums were very clear about how important ECC is

Data storage is directly affected by raid z2, Plex is not

im still not sure about what to run on my NAS

if your memory is fucky with z raid it's bye bye

ZFS, unRAID (XFS), mergerfs + snapraid

In my limited experience FreeNAS and zfs z2 has been good to me

How many disks, how many reliable external backups? @Goz3rr

4 disks, but i want to expand

ZFS can't expand with single disks

one hard drive already broke, it sent a mail, resilvering was a breeze

How many disks do you want to have?

i have 8 bays

How large are the single disks going to be?

8TB

Mh that's too large for raid6

i don't want to run hardware raid

Does your NAS have reliable external backups?

Or are you using raid as a backup? (don't)

there's nothing on there

there's 4 unpartitioned disks in it

and a 500GB 970 evo plus

How much reliability do you need?

And do you rather read or rather write?

(you can see selecting a raid level is science)