What’s the overhead for a page checksum? I’ve seen various numbers thrown out, but I thought that Paul Randal had written at one point that it was around 1-2%. I can’t find a reference, but in this post, Paul doesn’t dispute that.

In any case, it’s better to find corruption than save 2% of your CPU. I’d argue the same thing for performance monitoring, which I’ve often seen referenced at 5% of the load. If you don’t have 5% overhead, you have other problems.

You need to measure things.