Well right. It protects against silent bitrot on the hard drives. But it does this by caching and checksumming in RAM, so now you need to defend against bitflip

Well right. It protects against silent bitrot on the hard drives. But it does this by caching and checksumming in RAM, so now you need to defend against bitflips in RAM. It's not that ZFS without ECC is completely unsafe... it's just not as safe as it could be. ECC RAM becomes the next biggest concern once you've addressed on-disk bitrot.