Sure, the corruption can occur, but if the memory is not faulty, ZFS will detect data corruption in-situ during a scrub. It's just that ECC errors can introduce their own corruption that is separate, during write operations only.
I believe if you have no choice but to use non-ECC (e.g. existing hardware that is limited by Intel's stupid design choice of "ECC is only for servers"), ZFS is still much better than using ext4. It still protects against a different class of errors which is HDD degradation. When used in RAID-Z it can even recover for them.
For perfect protection ECC is necessary. But this is not always possible financially. I think it's a bit of a wild statement to say that if you can't afford a server with ECC you should forget about ZFS entirely.
The article tells you that if you don’t need ECC memory, bitrot as a risk isn’t that important to you. It is clear that you don’t want to pay for that kind of safety so. So if bitrot isn’t that important, you can go with any other file system, or ZFS but don’t pretend you’re covered.
I would rather run XFS or EXT4 with ECC memory than ZFS without ECC because silent bitrot is extremely rare because drives and protocols are full of error correction stuff.
Memory is the real weak spot from a bitrot perspective.
Sure, the corruption can occur, but if the memory is not faulty, ZFS will detect data corruption in-situ during a scrub. It's just that ECC errors can introduce their own corruption that is separate, during write operations only.
I believe if you have no choice but to use non-ECC (e.g. existing hardware that is limited by Intel's stupid design choice of "ECC is only for servers"), ZFS is still much better than using ext4. It still protects against a different class of errors which is HDD degradation. When used in RAID-Z it can even recover for them.
For perfect protection ECC is necessary. But this is not always possible financially. I think it's a bit of a wild statement to say that if you can't afford a server with ECC you should forget about ZFS entirely.