Comment by forinti

How do you know they weren't faulty? Blip flips are usually silent unless you have ECC memory or are actively testing for faulty cells.

Somewhat recently, Firefox implemented memory testing in their crash reporter and found 10% of reports were due to bit-flips[0].

If it weren't for reading that HN thread, I would never have being prompted to check and find the faulty memory in my laptop. It would have gone undetected and continued to corrupt whatever was stored in the affected cells. I did run memtest86 not long after I bought the laptop, so sometime between running that first memtest86 and the 12 months after, it developed the fault.

Non-ECC memory sometimes fails and there's a good chance you'll never know.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47252971

Most devices never test their memory and don’t have ecc, so you generally never know. Random instability can be fixed by restarting and your program not being in an area with bad bits anymore.

Anecdotally, RAM failures are more common than they used to be in previous decades, I assume due to increased capacities and smaller process nodes. Looser manufacturing standards may also play a part.

The component category I've never seen fail is CPU.

I have had a RAM stick start frequently failing ECC checks after a couple years use. I also had the VRAM on a GPU fail, but you could blame that one on overheating from the nearby compute core. I agree is rarer though.

I've seen every single component of a system fail, the least I've seen fail has been the CPU itself (I've only seen one fail out of thousands).

Memory seems to fail pretty commonly overall, less common than harddisks but more common than motherboards.

The issue is that I'm used to using ECC ram, which fails loud when it's actually bad.. consumer memory won't tell you unless you can't boot.. and everyone disables the startup memory testing too.. (in fact, I think it's disabled by default for the last 10 years because people want to boot quickly).

I recently had part of a 32 gig DIMM go bad on a 128 gig system. One of the larger VMs was spontaneously rebooting for no apparent reason. I was able to find the addresses with MemTest86 and map out 512 megs of the affected DIMM with the Linux kernel memmap option.

I've had a RAM stick fail.

Granted, I've been building my own computer for 30 years and I've only seen it happen ONCE.

But I've seen plenty of other failures:

- Two hard drives -- One got dropped on the floor, so it was no surprise, the other was showing degraded performance and SMART showed some scary numbers and I was able to replace it before I lost data.

- One GPU, replaced under warranty.

- One AIO water cooler, replaced under warranty. Somehow, the water vanished from the loop. I'm guessing a microscopic leak that evaporated as fast as it leaked.

- Two power supplies -- One randomly exploded. Just started making popping noises and shooting sparks out the back. At autopsy, I determined that the fan failed (it was hard to spin manually) and it overheated. The other was just being overloaded. I had just gotten a new GPU and the PSU wasn't big enough for it.

- Several case fans.

Never seen a CPU or motherboard failure, even when my AIO water cooler was failing and my CPU was constantly at thermal limits. Never had an SSD/NVMe failure.

I had a 2012 mac book pro that burned out 2 different crucial memory sticks. Would have bricked the machine if it was the soldered-on type, but it was the last model apple sold that have swappable memory. Crucial had a lifetime warranty so they replaced them for free.

I used to game on it and I think the design just couldn't handle the cpu and dgpu being active for long periods, it would get extremely hot in the area close to where the memory was.

Anecdata: a coworker found a single bit flip corruption in a file he wrote in his computer. He ran memtest86 on his memory, and which found one of the two sticks was defective. The computer otherwise ran perfectly fine for years; and we would have never noticed if the file format didn't have built-in checksums.

I also have been using PC's for a long time, thirty years. The only time I have seen ram fail during use was within the last 5 years. My 10th gen platform and 32 gigs of ram DDR4 and one of the sticks failed, this was before the ramapocalypse of course, the sticks were replaced under warranty. But I have had systems in my shop with failed ram. it happens, but its rare, unless its cheap ram, less rare.

Well, you’re lucky. I had to change laptop memory sticks a few times. Though not since they are soldered directly to the motherboard

Oh well, it's fairly common.Maybe not in a singular/several rarely used (and not monitored) desktop computers, but.... it's common once you have quite a few under your care.

Same, it's either bad to begin with or it's basically immortal.

This isn’t true anymore beginning with DDR4 speeds.

on older PC bios would perform a memory test - you may remember those - and that's where it would mark a bunch of pages dead/unusuable and it was not uncommon at all.

i've seen ram fail, some of them are bitflip, some of them just refuse to boot.

The only thing i've never seen fail is the Case lol. Air cooler too if you don't count the fan.

I've seen some fail. Might have had to do with the fact that the computers were literally flooded (river came up faster than the sandbaggers could keep up) while running.

You may literally be the only one.

I've had a few RAM sticks fail, but the ECC usually caught it first. Also had one case that somehow the stick slightly unseated itself; dunno how but it was out of service for months until someone opened it up and reseated the stick.

...granted though I've also seen a backpane on a server fail. I didn't think that was even possible until that point.

> I've been using computers for more than 40 years now and the one component I have never seen fail is RAM.

I think over the decades I got one RAM disk fail. And another one didn't fail but, although I bought a pack of four sticks (2x x2), was detected (by memtest, when building the rig), as having another model name than the three others: even the shop who sold me the RAM was confused (don't know how that happened).

The usual component that I've seen fail the most would be the PSU? (before I started buying quality ones). One NVMe drive (an "ADATA") died on me even though it was nearly new.

PC assembled with quality parts usually last a very long time.

Interesting, I've had two fail already in much shorter time. One was brand new, another quite old.

I used to work in IT recycling, and let me put you at ease, RAM goes all the time.

Common scenario:

200 PCs at least 6 years old, often over a decade old, come in on pallets.

We pick up the first 50, stack them on benches, and power them on.

At least 10 wont post.

Of that 10, reseating memory and other little jobs fixes 5.

Of the remaining 5, replacing or removing memory gets 4/5 them to post.

Testing those sticks in other PCs confirms the RAM is dead.

Into the scrap it goes.

The remaining PC is dead mobo, PSU or needs a new CMOS battery.

I've seen plenty of DIMMs fail ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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