What about the benefit of using ECC RAM for a file server? I don't see that available in consumer grade H/W. (As far as network H/W I'm in full agreement.)
If you plan on running a ZFS file server at home, which enthusiasts prefer because it's one of the only filesystems that supports full file checksumming to prevent bit rot.
Anyway, the ZFS approach is to inherently trust the data that's in RAM over the data on the drive if there's a discrepancy, so ECC RAM is required to maintain the integrity of data on RAM.
All filesystems inherently trust the data that is in RAM. There's nothing any piece of software can reasonably do about memory it can't trust. It's therefore a good idea to run ECC RAM, regardless of which filesystem you run. You can be running your filesystem on Ext4 or the legacy BSD Unix File System, and it would still be a good idea to use ECC.
That ZFS needs ECC moreso than other filesystems is an often repeated misconception. It's just that ZFS (and e.g. Btrfs) is often run on file servers, on which ECC is recommended.
> the ZFS approach is to inherently trust the data that's in RAM over the data on the drive if there's a discrepancy, so ECC RAM is required to maintain the integrity of data on RAM.
This is absurd. Please read up (and understand) this before talking about it again. The benefits of ZFS and the benefits of ECC are orthogonal, though if your fileserver has both, it's a pretty darn robust system with respect to integrity -- assuming that (for example) the disk controllers don't lie about something being synced.
