Heh, well there's 2 things I wanted from ECC. Sure I wanted the very occasional random bit flip to be caught and fixed. Making the system more reliable, maybe

Heh, well there's 2 things I wanted from ECC. Sure I wanted the very occasional random bit flip to be caught and fixed. Making the system more reliable, maybe save a few process crashes or reboots over 10 years. Although I was much more interested in ability to find dying hardware. Whenever weird (file corruptions, processes dying, reboots, things not working like they did yesterday) could be from numerous causes. Voltage dips, problems in the power supply, software bugs, OS bugs, security compromise, defective CPU/Ram/motherboard/dimms, etc. It can be very hard to track down, you might well spend weeks and significant $$$ playing the game of swap the part and wait for the problem to reappear ... or not. Much like what recently happened to LinusT. I'll happy pay another 10% system price for a system that has a few less crashes and will tell me when it starts seeing memory errors (while fixing the small ones). I'm typing this from a Xeon E3-1230v5 bought in 2015, that cost LESS then the similar i7. I did spent a bit more on the motherboard ($50) and ram ($75), but it's been rock solid since and if I had a dimm problem it would likely be 10 minutes to troubleshoot and then I'd RMA or buy replacement ram. ECC reduces the chance of writing the wrong data to the right place on disk or, even worse, the right data to the wrong place.