ECC RAM vs non-ECC RAM for Ceph: ECC is worth the small premium for data integrity

Ceph doesn’t require ECC RAM, but non-ECC is risky. Ceph’s checksums catch corruption in transit and on disk, but memory bit flips can corrupt data in RAM before checksumming — and replication won’t help if all copies see the same corrupted data. For a homelab, non-ECC is probably fine, but if you care about your data, spend the extra $20-50 on used ECC DDR4. Your data’s not worth the $50 savings.