Running without ECC is no worse than doing so with any other filesystem [as far as I understand].<p>The thing about corrupting the entire zpool looks to be a bit of an urban legend (<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;jrs-s.net&#x2F;2015&#x2F;02&#x2F;03&#x2F;will-zfs-and-non-ecc-ram-kill-your-data&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;jrs-s.net&#x2F;2015&#x2F;02&#x2F;03&#x2F;will-zfs-and-non-ecc-ram-kill-yo...</a>). Flipping bits can of course cause problems, but doing a scrub after a bit is flipped in memory doesn&#x27;t hose your whole pool. There&#x27;s been endless discussion and flame wars on the topic, but I&#x27;ve never once heard someone who actually had it happen (because it can&#x27;t really happen). You <i>can</i> lose some data due to bit flips, you <i>won&#x27;t</i> however lose everything in the whole volume like some people claim (unless you have something like an entire chip on the memory fail, then you&#x27;re definitely screwed but neither ECC nor a different FS will help you there).<p>ECC is a <i>good idea</i> and it&#x27;s not hugely expensive, but there is one very big difference. That is, most people who might want to build a NAS have a decent bit of spare hardware lying around that they might be able to repurpose. That hardware is probably an old desktop machine and doesn&#x27;t have ECC, so if you insist on using ECC then you can&#x27;t use that old machine and have to buy a new mobo+RAM at least. I&#x27;ve been running ZFS for years without ECC doing weekly scrubs and never once destroyed anything.<p>Edit: the counter-argument&#x2F;source of the theory that you absolutely need ECC is primarily this post <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;forums.freenas.org&#x2F;index.php?threads&#x2F;ecc-vs-non-ecc-ram-and-zfs.15449&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;forums.freenas.org&#x2F;index.php?threads&#x2F;ecc-vs-non-ecc-...</a> if you want to the other side for yourself.