[jeffbee]

According to this paper, 8% of DIMMs and 32% of machines suffered from at least one correctable error per year. Without ECC, that's an undetected and uncorrected error. The average machine in the study had over 22,000 corrected errors per year. The paper observes that "memory errors are not rare events". If you're running without ECC, you are quite likely to have some undetected corruption, which could range from a single erroneous bit over the lifetime of the machine all the way up to constant unexplained crashes and file or filesystem corruption. There are plenty of use cases where it doesn't matter but for workstation use you presumably care about the results.

https://storage.googleapis.com/pub-tools-public-publication-...