In the past I've had a flimsy RAM module in a macbook Pro and it was a real pain.
Everything appeared to work just fine, but on stressing the RAM with a lot of virtual machines the host would crash.
That was not the main issue, but took some time to diagnose as I was also running beta virtualisation software and was tempted to blame the change instead of the hardware.
Copying virtual machines from one disk to another did end up corrupting the data.
That was painful to find out.
Almost exactly the same thing happened to me - marginal RAM in an old style macbook pro. Drove me absolutely crazy.
People always talk about cosmic rays as what ECC is guarding against - not at all! It's shitty RAM, especially in laptops. When it's under stress.. for example buffering files in a large copy.. and you find out months later when it's too late to fix it. Not "theoretical" at all.
In the past I've had a flimsy RAM module in a macbook Pro and it was a real pain. Everything appeared to work just fine, but on stressing the RAM with a lot of virtual machines the host would crash. That was not the main issue, but took some time to diagnose as I was also running beta virtualisation software and was tempted to blame the change instead of the hardware.
Copying virtual machines from one disk to another did end up corrupting the data. That was painful to find out.