Why does memory (RAM) fail?

[J.Witvliet at mindef.nl]

You mention “crap quality” components. Sure, quality veries, sometimes reflected in its price.

However, far more likely is the possibility that people don’t know (or care) how to treat sensitive components. I’ve thousands of times people touching ESD sensitive components like mem, cpu without proper wrist bands and prepared working bench. After I complained, they turn it on, and reply “it is working, so what?”

Issue is, that ESD-damage can take days, weeks, even years (!) to surface, and cause un-funny problems.

A big telco cracked down and demanded ESD-awareness of all its employees and contractors, having a noticeable impact on their availability.


From: "Sam Varshavchik" <mrsam at courier-mta.com<mailto:mrsam at courier-mta.com>>
Date: Thursday, 8 January 2026 at 10:48:38 pm
To: "Ubuntu user technical support, not for general discussions" <ubuntu-users at lists.ubuntu.com<mailto:ubuntu-users at lists.ubuntu.com>>
Subject: Re: Why does memory (RAM) fail?

Tony Arnold writes:

> Any insight as to why the memory failed after a relatively short time
> would be much appreciated.

Same reason why it would be defective out of the box: crap quality.

Some years I built a server, using name-brand components. It would
occasionally lock up. Like you, defective RAM never occured to me. I swapped
out pretty much everything, from CPU, to the video card, to the motherboard.

Eventually I isolated it to one of the four RAM sticks being bad.
Fortunately it was still under warranty and I swapped it out. No hiccups
since then.


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