I’ll strongly disagree. Anyone who cares about the data they store in their server should care about ECC. There’s a specific reason it’s used so widely by servers, not just financial databases or whatever.
There’s also a ton of misinformation on the Internet about it, so don’t buy into the “ZFS write hole” or whatever. But ECC is very important in my experience. It’s saved my bacon in a material way twice now, and in ways that normal RAM would have just silently continued breaking things. Really that’s not much of a price premium if you’re willing to buy used, so it’s more a question of why not?
There are many computers (especially business line computers including low power SFF) that will take ECC or even ship with it from ebay or whatever. Or you can build rigs with ECC, I’ve done this route twice and had good results.
I respect your perspective and personal experience, and I’m not trying to convince you (I’m not even downvoting you, as it’s not a disagreement button). I’m trying to convince whoever might come along and read this that the small extra price is worth it if their computer is going to hold data dear to them and be running 24x7.
ECC is extremely good at covering cosmic ray bitflips, which happen with extreme regularity on software that runs and modifies data on the fly- server software. Yes, even home run stuff. That’s just playing Russian roulette, it probably won’t break anything, but why take the risk at least 10 times every day?
It’s also great at catching failing RAM sticks and preventing them from doing horrible things to every bit of data running through them. This is the failure ECC caught for me at home twice.
I have only 2.5 decades in the enterprise server and software space, I won’t claim to your 4. But I know I wouldn’t take that risk at work, and I value my home data more rather than less.
I’m not a researcher or even a particularly well practiced rhetorician, so here’s probably a much more convincing argument.
Or this perhaps.