See "Your computer is broken". They essentially inserted a stress test into the game that verified if the hardware was still doing calculations correctly, and if not, inform the user.
It is incomprehensible that there are still NAS devices being sold without ECC support.
Synology took a step in the right direction to offer prosumer devices with ECC but it is not really advertised as such. It is actually difficult to find which do have ECC and which ones don't.
I just look it up because if it was true it would have been news to me. Synology have been known to be stingy with Hardware Spec. But none of what I called Prosumer, the Plus Series have ECC memory by default. And there are "Value" and "J" Series below that.
Edit: Only two model from the new xx21 series using AMD Ryzen V has ECC memory by default.
- Edit -
Also, bit flips in the non-ECC memory are _the_ cause of the "bitrot" phenomenon. That is when you write out X to a storage device, but you get Y when you read it back. A common explanation is that the corruption happens _at rest_. However all drives from the last 30+ years have FEC support, so in reality the only way a bit rot can happen is if the data is damaged _in transit_, while in RAM, on the way to/from the storage media.
So, if you ever decide if to get an ECC RAM, get it. It's very much worth it.
Problems can definitely happen in the IO controller, RAID controller, cable, and disk controller. AFAIK all of these were seen and motivations for the existence of ZFS. One of their biggest insistence was that drives are universally lying bastards and should not be trusted any further than they can be thrown.
My old Honda crv however would turn traction control on if your pressure was low - which worked by applying brakes to wheels that were slipping. If you were going up a slippery hill you would soon have no power, sliding backwards nearly off the road in nowhere West Virginia on the way to a ski resort.
I live in Denver but spend a lot of time skiing around 11k feet, maybe the higher elevation means more radiation.
Aside: I'm surprised you got a TPMS programming tool instead of a set of steelies. Big wheels? Multiple winter vehicles?
Interestingly enough, average background radiation is actually the highest in the US exactly where you are[0] and I've seen comments (on a few websites talking about it) ranging from "the Rockies are loaded in Uranium" to "what about the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons site". Perhaps you're exactly in the right place to be an advocate for ECC :)
Of all the things to be worried about, like OS bugs, bad hardware configuration, etc. bad memory is one of those really troubling things. You look at the code and say "it's can't make it here, because this was set" but when you can't trust your memory you can't trust anything.
And as the timeline goes to infinity, you may also get one of these reports and be asked to fix it... good luck.