[empthought]

> 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.