When you have a RAID of any kind you need to periodically scrub it, meaning compare data on each drive byte by byte to all other drives (let's assume we are talking just about mirroring). So if you have two drives in an mdadm array and the scrubbing process finds that a block differs from drive A to drive B, and neither drive reports an error, then the scrubber simply takes the block from the highest numbered drive and makes that the correct data, copying it to the other drive. What's worse is that even if you use 3 or more drives, Linux software RAID does the same thing, despite having more info available. On the other hand, ZFS does the scrubbing by checksums, so it knows which drive has the correct copy of the block.

How often does this happen? According to what I have been reading, without ECC RAM and without ZFS, your machines get roughly one corrupt bit per day. In other words, that could be a few corrupt files per week.

My conclusion is that as I am building my NAS, I want ECC RAM and ZFS for things I cannot easily replicate.