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I have several non-ecc machines running 24/7 for years without any crashes.

Sure, not particularly surprising. However do you track when systemd restarts a daemon that died? See any strange dmesg errors? Had fsck report filesystem corruptions?

Many errors won't cause a crash, but said errors can accumulate in processes, filesystems, and files and you won't know why. 10 years from now you may find a photo, music file, or binary that's somehow corrupt and have no idea how it happened.

The only machine I've had consistent crashes with due to memory issues IS my ECC memory workstation. Everything else has NEVER crashed due to a memory issue.

But... how do you know that? Without ECC, the only way would be that none of your other machines have ever crashed at all, right?

Yes, that's basically it. Except it's more like, "ugh my ECC laptop blue screened again!" vs. me not able to even remember the last crash like that on my non-ECC machines.

My ECC workstation had lots of memory issues where it blue-screened on the windows side. For some reason that wouldn't happen on the Linux side.

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