[simcop2387]

You really only end up needing that if and only if you're also going to do live deduplication of large amounts of data. Very few people actually need that, just using compression with lz4 or zstd depending on your needs will suffice for just about everyone and perform better. the ECC argument is probably about a 50/50 kind of thing, you can get away without it and ZFS will do it's best to detect and prevent issues but if the data was flipped before it was given to ZFS then there's nothing anyone can do. You might get some false positives when reading data back if you got some flaky ram but as long as you have parity or redundancy on the disks then things should still get read correctly even if a false problem is detected. That might mean you want to run a scrub (essentially ZFS's version of fsck) more often to look for potential issues but it shouldn't fundamentally be a big deal. If you end up wanting 24/7 highly available storage that won't blip out occasionally you'll probably really want the ECC ram but if you're fine with having to reboot it occasionally or tell it to repair problems that it thinks were there (but weren't because the disk is fine but the ram wasn't) then you should be fine. The extra checksums and data that ZFS can use for all this can make it really robust even on bad hardware. I had a bios update cause some massive PCIE bus issues that I didn't realize were going on for a bit and ZFS kept all my data in good condition even though writes were sometimes just never happening because of ASPM causing issues with my controller card.