Non-ECC RAM is fine for your Proxmox homelab.

No, you don’t need ECC for a homelab. It’s nice to have, but unless you’re running production workloads where a random bit flip could cost you money, the real-world risk is tiny.

The “ZFS needs ECC” thing is mostly FUD. ZFS works fine without it. Yes, a memory error could theoretically corrupt data in flight, but in a homelab environment—where you’re probably rebooting for kernel updates anyway—the odds of a bit flip hitting something important are absurdly low. Scrubbing regularly handles the rest.

The bigger issue is cost and compatibility. ECC requires a server-grade CPU and motherboard (AMD Ryzen desktop supports it sometimes, Intel consumer almost never). You’ll pay more for the hardware and maybe lose performance. For a homelab running a few VMs for testing or media serving, that money is better spent on more RAM or a bigger SSD.

Unless you’re doing something like financial modeling or scientific computing where every calculation has to be exact, save the cash. Your homelab will survive.

Future You will thank you for buying 64GB of non-ECC instead of 16GB of ECC.