[msiebuhr]

Without ECC memory, ZFS carries the nasty risk of writing good data with a bad checksum, leading to data loss which would not occur in other filesystems

Assuming a memory error somewhere:

On ZFS you'd be writing bad data with a bad checksum, which would be caught by ZFS later on.

On (most) other filesystems you'd be writing bad data and no checksum, and you'd be none the wiser until garbage comes back.

It's a myth that ZFS requires ECC memory; ZFS is safer when running with ECC, but without ECC it will still save your data in a lot of places where most other filesystems won't.

See https://www.reddit.com/r/zfs/comments/7ng231/does_a_zfs_mirr... for a bunch of links on this.