Should I use ECC memory for my budget TrueNAS homelab?

Probably not. ECC memory is great for production servers or irreplaceable data, but in a budget homelab for tinkering, media, or testing, the protection is marginal. Memory errors that corrupt scrub checksums are rare with stable non-ECC RAM, and the cost premium for ECC-compatible hardware eats into your storage budget. If you’re worried, run a full memtest.