On Mon, 13 Jan 2014 22:51:38 -0000, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

On 13/01/14 20:33, D.M.Chapman wrote:
In article , Uncle Peter wrote:

I've found brand new cheap memory to be faulty 10% of the time. And
decent memory to be faulty 3% of the time.

Blimey...

Do you install it on a nice nylon carpet with no static protection or
something??

Out of hundreds (possibly even thousands - some machines take many
DIMMs) I've had one failure that I remember, and that was far from
cheap RAM. Sun microsystems stick of ram in a T5220 that buggered
around from new (I think it was rebadged micron IIRC).

I've fitted all sorts of cheap nasty RAM in machines over the years.
Never had f single one turn out to be faulty (yet...)


well I have. hundreds of machines over the years. Half a dozen bad RAM
often after several years, or only showing up when some other card was
plugged in the bus

Mosdt common fault is hard disk failure then fan failure then RAM and
then CPU. Managed to escape the 'bad capacitor' phase.

Did you memtest the memory when you bought it? Perhaps you only find out years later because you tax the memory more?

In terms of failures once installed - someone said they had never had
RAM fail once installed? After hard drives (very frequent) and PSUs
(fairly often) I'd say RAM is probably up there with CPU fan failures.
Many of our machines run mirrored RAM so it doesn't take out the system
but it's still far from unheard of.

I'd be in agreement there.

Semiconductors age with time and temperature, and timings start to drift
to edge-of-spec esepcailly if the originals weren't great to start with.

RAM don't run so hot as CPU and GPU.

Given that commercial stuff is NOt enigeneered tpo 'worst case' but
generally engineered to 99.99% chance' level, it's surprsng that stuff
works as well as it does.

You could always buy RAM rated much faster than you're going to run it.

--
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Its single blade functions as a tiny canoe paddle.