Non-ECC is fine for a home NAS.

For most home setups, non-ECC RAM with ZFS is not something to lose sleep over. The theoretical risk—a flipped bit during a write causing ZFS to store a valid checksum for corrupted data—is real but astronomically rare in practice. Your drives are more likely to fail than your RAM.

If you’re building a NAS for media storage, backups, or a Plex server, spend the money on more drives or a UPS instead. ECC starts to matter when you’re running multiple VMs, databases, or production workloads where a tiny bit flip could cascade. At home? Your cat is a bigger threat to your data.

That said, if the price difference is small (e.g., you’re already on a platform that supports ECC, like certain Ryzen or Xeon builds), go for it. Otherwise, don’t feel bad about using regular RAM.

Future You will be fine with non-ECC.