Seeking out consumer hardware that supports ECC is, in my opinion, useless. If you have a legitimate need for the maximum amount of data integrity that you can afford, then sure, go for it. But if you actually have such a need, chances are you're not exactly buying consumer level parts anyway. Recommending everyone buy ECC is for the most part, ridiculous.
I see more memory failures at work than I see at home (because I've never seen a memory failure at home) and everything in our data center uses ECC memory. So ECC isn't magic, and it only protects against a specific failure mode, which is arguably not the most common.
Absolutely nothing. There seems to be a few people under the impression that there are frequent memory errors that ECC will correct, who are spreading this FUD around here. It's simply not true. It exists in the server world because if something were to happen, it could mean hours worth of lost work and money. In the consumer space, you're fooling yourself if you think ECC RAM is going to do anything for you besides make your wallet slightly lighter.
Who said ECC is magic? Why are you putting words into other people's mouths/beating strawmen? ECC is another layer of protection that isn't that expensive to implement in the grand scheme of things. If your willingness to pay is basically zero, then don't use ECC. For those of us who aren't destitute, it may make sense to use ECC.
Forgive me if I don't care at all that your large work server farm gets more errors than the ones you may or may not even detect, at home. One is much larger than the other, operates 24/7, and has ECC and probably other redundancies; the other is tiny, probably doesn't operate as actively 24/7, and has no ECC... are you even being serious here? I can't tell. This reminds me of a thread I saw once where a guy who allegedly works in IT says he has never seen memory errors in the 1000 machines he oversees in 15 years, or some b.s. like that. I feel sorry for the company that hired him, because anyone with an ounce of common sense knows how improbable that his.
And your statement about how only businesses need ECC is laughable. I agree with Cerb on this one. If your data corruption manages to get permanent, you may lose some priceless photos or something else. Ask around, there are people here who got their honeymoon photos corrupted, etc. It does happen sometimes. I can't agree with anyone who thinks consumer data protection is a needless luxury not worth protecting.
When Intel and AMD started packing ECC on their CPUs (and note that DIMMS can be viewed as L4 cache--so why not have ECC on that too? why make it the weakest link in the chain?), that speaks for itself. There will come a day when ECC DIMMs are standard because you just can't get away with NOT having it forever. Even today, there are corner cases that are soft error magnets. Think about a laptop with 16GB RAM on a long international flight at high altitudes. More likely than not, the user will get at LEAST one soft error. It's probably relatively harmless, but there's also a chance that it is very critical. Multiply that by enough trips over a year. Do you begin to see the problem here? And that's with current tech; as memory node sizes shrink even as DIMM capacity rises, it will get worse.
To repeat: if you don't want to pay for it in the meantime because you value your data integrity so little that you aren't willing to pay even a little extra for it, then that's your right. You probably don't think ZFS is worth it over NTFS, and you probably think RAID-5 is enough for large arrays, and you probably think a lot of things that used to be true but aren't as true anymore as the quantity of memory and storage has exponentially risen even as error rates have not declined per byte. There are others here who think that paying a little extra is worth it, though. You can get new microservers with ECC RAM for so cheap these days that I don't think it's unaffordable for most people. I got a brand-new MX130 S2 for under $150, and if I can sell the hard drive for anything, then it'll be even less. It's really the non-prebuilt Intel servers that get expensive, but even then, you can buy refurbs or used parts if necessary (though I would not--kind of defeats the purpose of trying in increase reliability to buy stuff off ebay or CL). Some of the prebuilt Intel microservers are somewhat reasonably priced if you want slightly lower power consumption. And you could also get a N40L if you just need a file server. All of them come with ECC standard.
My server is not running ecc and runs 24x7 without issues. What is ECC going to offer me?
Google for "silent data corruption." Just because you are not aware of any issues doesn't mean they don't exist. Silent data corruption does happen from time to time.
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