Re: They're not knocking ECC
"I would think the odds are significantly higher that the whole computer would be stolen"
As a matter of fact...
At a used-to-company, miscreants threw a heavy object through the front window of the office building, ran in, cut cables with wire cutters, grabbed the CPU boxen, and took off with the alarm blaring.
Then they did it again 2-3 weeks later, after the company got "all new computers". [I did the majority of the work from home and therefore had plenty of backups for my stuff and related projects].
Snatch-n-grab using low tech "steal a manhole cover and throw it through the window" and "cut all of the cables with wire cutters and run with the CPU boxen" is difficult to stop, but you CAN slow them down by using these lock & cable things [which I recommended after the 2nd theft, and bought some for myself].
That being said, thieves and miscreants will ALWAYS come up with a brute force and/or low tech way of defeating the highest tech security that you can possibly think up, like chaining up an ATM machine to a stolen towtruck and yanking it out of the bank office's wall.
The best security plan is to make sure that you slow them down as much as possible so that you're no longer "an easy mark".
ECC RAM apparently slows them down.