I'm going to be doing automated / algorithm trading with R. My question is, will ECC Ram be necessary? They are just so damn ugly looking...
why do you think they would be necessary? No they are not. But depending on your chosen hardware you may need ECC ram. It is not software or analysis dependent but hardware dependent.
CPU: XEON E5-1650 V3 Obviously there are non-ecc and ecc supported mobo's. The only X99 chipset board that supported ECC and was not horrendous looking was the Asus X99-E WS. Storage can just be any Sata SSD right?
Everywhere I go I'm being told conflicting information. Can you elaborate on why I now don't need EEC ram now?
Never had our seen a ram corruption with normal Ram so not seeing the point, even if your processor and ram bandwidth is maxed out. How much more sites it cost, never supplied out ever in 30 years of being in IT.
You don't need it until you need it. Similar to a backup Internet connection, a hard drive backup etc. How much you want to engineer your system to prevent/recovery from faults is up to you (and your wallet).
Why buy a Xeon 1xxx series if you didn't want ECC? The price premium isn't much, but companies running proper servers buy ECC RAM and it's not because they happen to like the looks. Some think it's required for large amounts of RAM, but that's what buffered RAM is for. A bit flip can cause a crash (best case), data corruption, or in terms of trading, totally screw up your view of the market, your order book, which positions you have on, etc. Not something I'd take a chance on. Bit flips happen far more often than most people realize, it's just that in most cases it does not have a significant impact (merely results in crash or silent corruption).
IT's almost always not needed at all anyway. Nothing should be done here from your machine which will require this check, only very very powerfull machines do need such things but not yours really. Only something server one and that's it. Thanks.