I think ECC is inevitable. With 128GB DIMMs being produced now and NV-DIMMs (DDR4 flash-on-dimm) just around the corner, some kind of hardware error detection is necessary.<p>This is similar to high capacity spinning drives. With smaller ones you could just go with RAID5 and not worry about anything, but when drives are 3-4TB and up, you have to use RAID6, because the spec error rate becomes too high to rely on a single parity drive.<p>Here, too, when you machine has 1-2TB of hybrid RAM/NVM you HAVE TO have some way to detect failures, even if it's not particularly good. Performance characteristics of RAM preclude the more robust algorithms such as wide (32bit) CRC from being used (narrower CRC could still be doable in hardware, though), but parity is a complete no brainer as the first step.