IMO, checksums at the filesystem and higher level are only useful for maybe detecting software problems, not cosmic ray RAM bitflips. ECC RAM is the only way t

IMO, checksums at the filesystem and higher level are only useful for maybe detecting software problems, not cosmic ray RAM bitflips. ECC RAM is the only way to reliably detect random RAM bit flips. Without ECC, if you read a block of data from disk into a RAM page, do whatever checksums you want - filesystem page, database page, whatever - and THEN a bit flip occurs, you are now processing bad data but think it's okay because all of the checksums passed. Every disk block has an ECC code recorded with it to detect and correct errors. Hardware busses have checksums to detect transmission errors. But without ECC RAM, there is no protection for RAM bit flips, and higher-level checksums won't help with that. It's ridiculous that all computers don't come with ECC RAM, and it's mainly that way because Intel wants to charge a premium for data center servers.