[craigyk]

So you're saying if you aren't using RAID on your ZFS vdevs than ZFS with non-ECC is no worse than anything else... and there is a valid scenario for doing so. I use ZFS on offline backup drives so that I can periodically mount them and scrub them too see if they need to be replaced updated. In my mind this is faster and more reliable than any custom verification scheme I might have come up with.

Also, if I understand correctly, your disaster scenario requires the RAM to keep repeatedly fing up in a way that allows ZFS to screw up repeatedly during corrections but coincidentally won't cause the system to outright crash? It's possible, but in my experience most of the ECC errors I've seen are pretty transient.