My experience with nolock is that you may get inconsistent rows with some fields before and some after update. Or even seeing duplicated rows when b-tree is reb

My experience with nolock is that you may get inconsistent rows with some fields before and some after update. Or even seeing duplicated rows when b-tree is rebalanced. But I never seen single fields being partially updated. Per Microsoft, page latch protects atomicity of a single field update. This is why nolock was extremely useful for insert-only tables and in our database design we had many of them.