According to Google statistics, bit flips are encountered at a rate of 8% per DIMM per year. https://research.google/pubs/pub35162/ https://research.google/pubs

According to Google statistics, bit flips are encountered at a rate of 8% per DIMM per year. https://research.google/pubs/pub35162/ https://research.google/pubs/pub35162/ You want ECC in your desktop if you cannot afford your data to become (silently) corrupted. A single bit-flip in a JPEG image can totally ruin it. And you won't notice without opening it, because the thumbnail is unaffected. When you finally notice, the corruption has possibly spread to backups already. For servers that is especially important, because data will reside cached in memory for days or even weeks. Also ECC is often the last line of defense against Rowhammer.