ECC RAM vs non-ECC RAM for TrueNAS: Hard drives are the real bottleneck, not RAM type

ECC RAM won’t bottleneck transfer speeds in a 4x HDD TrueNAS build — your hard drives max out at 500-800 MB/s, far below what any modern DDR4/DDR5 can handle. ECC adds a tiny 1-2% latency penalty in synthetic benchmarks, but it’s invisible in real-world file transfers. The real choice is about data integrity: ZFS likes ECC for detecting bit flips, but for a home media NAS, non-ECC is fine; for irreplaceable files, spend $50-100 for peace of mind.