Nevertheless, anyone who uses the computer for anything else besides games or movie watching, will greatly benefit from having ECC memory, because that is the only way to learn when the memory modules become defective.
Modern memories have a shorter lifetime than old memories and very frequently they begin to have bit errors from time to time long before breaking down completely.
Without ECC, you will become aware that a memory module is defective only when the computer crashes or no longer boots and severe data corruption in your files could have happened some months before that.
For myself, this was the most obvious reason why ECC was useful, because I was able in several cases to replace memory modules that began to have frequent correctable errors, after many years with little or no errors, without losing any precious data and without downtime.
