Is ECC RAM required for Ceph?

No, it’s not required. Ceph has checksums, replication, and scrub, so non-ECC RAM can technically work. But you’re playing with fire — memory bit flips can corrupt data before it gets checksummed, and replication won’t fix that. For a small homelab, non-ECC is probably fine, but if you care about the data, spend the extra $20-50 on ECC. Your data’s not worth the savings.