The lack of ECC in consumer grade CPUs is irritating, because when AMD was viable, they had ECC support in most of their CPUs (but you had to make sure the motherboard supported it). You could use a random AMD CPU + a motherboard supporting ECC & be sure of your data integrity.
These days I pay the "server" tax on the machines I build, buying Xeons just to get ECC. If they supported ECC, a normal i5 / i7 would probably be plenty, and the build would be less of a PITA as there would be more and cheaper motherboard choices with workstation basics like audio on board.
And yes, I use ZFS, and am otherwise pretty paranoid..
These days I pay the "server" tax on the machines I build, buying Xeons just to get ECC. If they supported ECC, a normal i5 / i7 would probably be plenty, and the build would be less of a PITA as there would be more and cheaper motherboard choices with workstation basics like audio on board.
And yes, I use ZFS, and am otherwise pretty paranoid..