>And when you multiply by the low probability that a DRAM error will cause catastrophic data loss, then it is very easy to come to a reasonable conclusion that ECC is not worth the expense.

If your data is worth nothing, then ECC isn't worth the expense.

That's part of the difference between more enterprise level and consumer level equipment. I do some work on my home computer, but I don't have ECC in it. I probably push a few terabytes of work related information over it a year. The rest is many more terabytes of movies and music, and other things that will never notice a bit error. At work where I move 10s of terabytes of information a day, and that information may have cost many hundreds of manhours to create, I use enterprise level memory, disks, and other parts.

I've seen both servers and desktops develop bad ram. You want to know what the difference is when it happens? I get MCE logs from the server and we replace the equipment before anything bad happens. When it happens on the desktop you can end up with crashing programs, reboots, and even worse, corrupt data written to disk.