Is ECC-RAM necessary for a fileserver?

[Dodge]

I'm thinking about building a homeserver sometime in the future. At the moment I don't really need one yet, but handling my external hard drives becomes a little bit of a pain in the ass, so it will happen sooner or later. I'll probably use RAID-Z1 or a similar btrfs-RAID, should it be stable at the time.

How important is ECC-RAM for a simple fileserver?

[Ssoele]

Not very, you would also need a Xeon CPU and a supported motherboard for that. That's a bit much for a simple fileserver.

[Dodge]

It would be cheaper using an AMD system, because AM3 CPUs and some AM3 boards support ECC. At the moment I just want to assess the risk of not using ECC.

[azeotrope]

Depends on how important your data is to you and how much you read/write this data. For an active business file server, there's definitely a benefit. Bit flipping is very rare and personally I wouldn't worry about it in my home server, but if you would like a little extra securityfor your data, then go for it. Low end cpus on Ivy bridge also support ECC