ECC memory and server hardware in general is surprisingly cheap if you’re fine buying used gear that’s a few years old. Once that stuff gets old enough that it’s being cycled out of data centers en masse, it hits the used market and the supply often exceeds the limited demand for that kind of stuff.

With that said, I don’t know if that’s true at the moment.

Bit rot is real, I’ve seen it first hand in plenty of cases. While I tend to blame the storage device, for infrequently accessed files that have been copied multiple times across different drives, I can’t rule out RAM or some other source of the corruption.

Programs that use more memory could be slightly more susceptible to this sort of thing because if a bit gets randomly flipped somewhere in a computer’s memory, the bit flip more likely to happen in an application that has a larger ram footprint as opposed to an application with a small ram footprint.

I’m still surprised the percentage is this high.