Noob question, so in reading the op I've come to the conclusion that in order to run ZFS, you need to have ECC Ram. I have an i5 on an ASUS mobo with 16GB non ecc ddr3@1600. I'm guessing even if I bought ECC ram for it, the ECC function would be unusable. So then, I would literally have to replace mobo,cpu,ram in order to support the "Data Integrity" function of my fileserver... and there isn't any way around it. Am I correct?
Just for the record. Everything these guys are saying to you is correct. The i5 CPU's from Intel, and the i7's, basically have ECC support disabled. You can see this on ark.intel.com for the various CPU's. They do this on purpose, because dollar-per-performance, the Xeon CPUs (which are what they want you to buy for server situations) are much, much more expensive, since of course, they are being bought by enterprises, who aren't as price conscious as you and I are. They want the enterprises to be forced to buy the Xeons. It makes sense from a business standpoint. The good news, however, is that the G3220/3240 type "Pentium" Haswells *do* strangely support ECC. So if you want ECC support on the modern Intels, you need to buy either the Xeons, certain i3's, or the lower priced Pentium'ish guys. But if you have an i5 or i7, you are SOL.
On TOP of that, you must have a motherboard and chipset that supports ECC RAM. Almost zero of the "desktop" or "gamer" boards do that. You specifically have to go finding a server board.
So yes, in your case, you are completely SOL, and what you have cannot be salvaged in any part, for an ECC setup.
You need a new CPU, a new mobo (most of us recommend the SuperMicro X10SLM or X10SL7 or similar to small/home users), and the proper ECC RAM.