Memory errors are still a concern, however, RAM is not used for persistent storage.
If a bit flip occurs during the path to storing data, that could get persisted. That's a moment in time, though. Maybe you'll notice the document you just wrote seems corrupted, or just has a typo.
But if you write successfully to disk, you are trusting that data to stay there long-term. If years later your drive corrupts a bit, you may have a very hard time noticing. Bad RAM manifests as computer instability and you can just replace RAM without data loss, as nobody is permanently storing data in RAM
Because the data spends so much longer on disk than in RAM, the chance of a bit flip affecting stored data.
It takes bad luck for sure, but I once ruined a bunch (a big bunch) of my photos by syncing them to a NAS with a faulty RAM. It was a Synology Ds212 I think, back in 2012. Mind you, the device didn’t produce symptoms other than messing up regularly spaced bytes in the transferred files.
I am super paranoid about this kind of stuff and don’t consider a copy finished until it is first done copying then also passes an independent rsync -c.
If a bit flip occurs during the path to storing data, that could get persisted. That's a moment in time, though. Maybe you'll notice the document you just wrote seems corrupted, or just has a typo.
But if you write successfully to disk, you are trusting that data to stay there long-term. If years later your drive corrupts a bit, you may have a very hard time noticing. Bad RAM manifests as computer instability and you can just replace RAM without data loss, as nobody is permanently storing data in RAM
Because the data spends so much longer on disk than in RAM, the chance of a bit flip affecting stored data.