Ever had memory fail on you?

[techfuzz]

I've been using computers since the late 1980's and never had a piece of memory in any of my personal computers fail until this week. I think that's a pretty amazing streak! One 1GB stick of a matched pair of Corsair PC3200 gave up the ghost as confirmed by memtest.

How common do you think it is for memory to go bad? Is it more or less common for the average Joe vs. a power user?

techfuzz

 

[Nathelion]

I imagine it's pretty rare, if you don't count doa sticks.

 

[techfuzz]

I thought it was pretty rare too--until I started looking around and found lots of people with similar issues all related to faulty memory.

techfuzz

 

[Tarrant64]

I think a lot of it could be compatability issues that people just don't look up. Sometimes overclocking is what causes it to fail.

Some people could be shocking their mem chips if not properly grounding themselves while installing. I think there are several reasons which would cause memory to fail.

I've only had 1 dead stick, and that was a DOA. However, my other friend had 2 sticks go back once. It turned out he admitted to overclocking though, so he knew he had it coming.

 

[kef7]

I had 4 sticks of crucial ballistix PC3200 go bad. Considering that they sent defective sticks back to me I think the total was actually 7 sticks in the end.

 

[Fayd]

had 2x64 mb of generic branded memory from outpost.com go bad on me.

not too fussed about it, cause i only paid 10 bucks for it in total.

 

[Noema]

No. Never...so far.

 

[AMDfreak]

It is rare, but I've had a couple fail on me over the years.

 

[techfuzz]

I'm surprised at how many people have had memory fail on them. I would have thought it would be much less than < 50%.

techfuzz

 

[God Mode]

Killed a friends 512mb pc133 trying to clean the caked on dust from it. It wasn't fun paying to replace it.

 

[VirtualLarry]

I lost a stick once. It really surprised me, generally I figure that as long as the RAM isn't DOA, then it should last essentially forever. (Overvolting RAM is a different story.)

I've had various DOA sticks, that errored in Memtest86+ out of the box, too. The most curious were a pair of Centon 1GB sticks, that errored out in one particular test on an AMD64 rig all the time, but were just fine in an Intel rig. I figure that something about them was out of spec, so it didn't work with AMD64's IMC, but was tested only on Intel.
I put them into an Intel box and sold them to my friend.

I damaged a stick once too, pushing too hard to get it into the slot, slid one of those little SMT capacitors right off the board. Amazingly, it still worked, as far as I could tell.

 

[techfuzz]

Originally posted by: VirtualLarry
I damaged a stick once too, pushing too hard to get it into the slot, slid one of those little SMT capacitors right off the board. Amazingly, it still worked, as far as I could tell.

Maybe it was an ECC module and you knocked off the ECC part

techfuzz