Personal anecdote: Upgraded RAM in my PC, ran memtest, everything fine. A year later, I need to move and so I consolidate all my data on a big hard disk. As the disk is new, I run some verification and notice some non-matching checksums. Long story short, the new RAM had become defective, and a new memtest showed a handful of errors after a few hours. Had I had ECC on that machine, I probably would have seen notifications about memory errors even before that day (plus the errors would likely have been corrected).
If Ryzen allows us to build a powerful PC with ECC for little more money than a non-ECC one, I'll happily pay for this "feel good feature". The current ECC-capable alternative from the Intel universe (Xeon CPU & motherboard) is simply too expensive for most people.
Definitely this. The extra safety of mind offered by ECC RAM is totally worth the tiny price difference for me. The only thing that stopped me from actually using it was the lack of (affordable) CPU support. Ryzen changes that.
On that note, I hope it's not long until we can easily buy ultraportable laptops with ECC RAM without paying through the nose for Intel's ridiculous prices for their mobile Xeon CPUs.
Anyway as a former memory subsystem designer and a former employee of a memory chip maker, I like ECC. It provides some protection against bus noise errors even if you have full confidence in the memory chips themselves.
While there is reason to think soft errors are much less common than often claimed and therefore ECC memory has been much less necessary than people think (at least within the atmosphere), there's now a pretty good reason to prefer ECC memory because of rowhammer.
PS: Radiation also makes a huge difference.
In any case I LOVE ECC. Sure random radiation caused bit flips are relatively rare. But it's REALLY nice to see high levels of ECC errors when something died and not have to wonder if it's the flash drive, power supply, graphics card etc. Sure sometimes its the dimm, sometimes it's the motherboard, sometimes it's the CPU. But with ECC errors you can much more quickly/easily tell if it changes when you swap things around.
It's not a silver bullet if the user is just paranoid about data integrity (nothing beats end-to-end integrity checks built into your system, while ECC only addresses one step in the process).