I feel like userbinator is expecting that a failing stick will go from working to failing so hard you'd notice, with or without ECC; so the corruption would be time limited. My experience with ECC suggests that many, maybe most of the failing sticks probably would fit that, but some of the failing devices only threw a few errors a day for months and we continued to use them until retirement; because replacement is intrusive and a few corrected errors a day didn't hurt anything... had a non-ECC stick failed in the same way, chances are you wouldn't notice in a timely fashion.

That said, I don't run ECC in my home. I'm not willing to spend the premium in dollars, performance, or time to do it. My storage servers are all ex-desktops and I try to chase performance in a budget, ECC ram usually doesn't run at high speed and it often costs at least twice as much... that doesn't make sense for a desktop, so my servers suffer too.