OpenZFS on OS X

And at the risk of “appeal to authority” here’s ZFS co-founder and current ZFS dev at Delphix, Matthew Ahrens from a thread on Hardforum; see bolded sections re: the ability of ZFS to mitigate in-memory corruption with a specific debug flag (at a performance cost) as well as the bottom line re: ECC

There’s nothing special about ZFS that requires/encourages the use of ECC RAM more so than any other filesystem. If you use UFS, EXT, NTFS, btrfs, etc without ECC RAM, you are just as much at risk as if you used ZFS without ECC RAM. Actually, ZFS can mitigate this risk to some degree if you enable the unsupported ZFS_DEBUG_MODIFY flag (zfs_flags=0x10). This will checksum the data while at rest in memory, and verify it before writing to disk, thus reducing the window of vulnerability from a memory error.