Traditional filesystems will let files just sit on the hard drive, untouched.
ZFS is a lot more active... checksumming and caching mean that important information is spending time in RAM. It's not good if that information gets corrupted.
ZFS is a lot more active... checksumming and caching mean that important information is spending time in RAM. It's not good if that information gets corrupted.
ZFS doesn't cache in any special way, or more than your typical filesystem.
Lack of ECC just lessens the benefits of ZFS, it doesn't exacerbate any problems.
It's not that ZFS without ECC is completely unsafe... it's just not as safe as it could be. ECC RAM becomes the next biggest concern once you've addressed on-disk bitrot.