Precisely. My trust in a non-ECC machine is much lower. I've had slow on-disk data corruption that I've tracked down to failing memory in retail-grade hardwar

Precisely. My trust in a non-ECC machine is much lower. I've had slow on-disk data corruption that I've tracked down to failing memory in retail-grade hardware, and it's been in a collection of large media files being sync'ed between machines. Those corruptions tend to be un-noticed at the time, and are effectively impossible (without original sources) to resolve later on, but happily also tend to have minimal impact. Either way, I've been using computers longer than TFA and wouldn't build a home lab box without ECC.