Now I need to take a loan in order to afford 32gb for replacement thanks to the ai bros hoarding all the chips…
Tried on three different PCs, both Intel and AMD, both sticks are damaged, somehow
Now I need to take a loan in order to afford 32gb for replacement thanks to the ai bros hoarding all the chips…
Tried on three different PCs, both Intel and AMD, both sticks are damaged, somehow
If I may ask: how?
(background: always owned multiple pc / built frequently / never had one stick of bad ram over decades. Was it just luck or better vendor or good handling)
I wonder also. I’m guessing maybe a bad lot?
The story starts two years ago when I bought them in a kit with 4 16gb sticks from micron. When installed all four the motherboard, I installed Linux and it crashed (froze) when running a VM with KVM. Tested with memtestx86 and it will always fail at the 5th test (after around 20 mins of crunching) and at reboot the bios would reset to default. Because it was an AMD Ryzen and all the web results said so, I assumed it was some kind of incompatibility and removed two sticks. With two sticks, it passed the test. I swapped the two sticks and it passed the test again. So I left those 2 16gb sticks in the Ryzen and used the other 2 16gb sticks with the Intel. Both passed the test.
Fast forward 18 months, in the Intel I’m copying a file from the nvme to the HDD and it tells me
Input/output error.I start diagnosing the btfrs filesystem, find corruption in the counter, scrub finds uncorrectable errors in the virtio-win.iso file, the one I wanted to move. I assumed it was some btrfs bug, deleted the file as I could download it again, moved on. After a few weeks a flatpak app wouldn’t start. Read the dmesg, see a btrfs message about some corrupted inode or something like that. I use find to find the file at that inode, it was the flatpak. Again assumed it was a btrfs bug, reinstalled the flatpak and moved on.
Then yesterday the system froze. This time I tested with memtestx86. It failed immediately within seconds. Took out one stick, swapped them, no change. I went back and swap them with the other two sticks bought in the same lot, those would pass the test.
100% consistent with static damage.
Hm, sounds like it. Micron is certainly reputable, and the issues hints at memory, although I’ve had similar that turned out not to be ram. Certainly very weird!
On another note, I personally do absolutely not trust btrfs due to its creator and very long time shaky lossy raid issues. Since there are enough performant and proven long time reliable filesystems available I use others.
Anyhow, getting to the point - I’d not entirely rule out something with btrfs as a separate issue too. I’ve just seen too many things that your ram issues could’ve been a few freak issues resulting in this.
Although I fully agree in your deduction!
The only RAM issue I ever had was like the 3rd PC I ever built. Using 2 modules in single channel mode worked fine. Putting them in for dual channel fried both the 3rd and 4th DIMM slots on the motherboard and the RAM that was in the 3rd slot.
I RMA’d both. It happened again.
When I sent in for a second RMA, I started wondering what is the issue, the board or the RAM? I never got an answer. Instead I got two companies blaming the other and starting a flame war in my email inbox. The board was from ASRock. I forgot who made the RAM. I just ran that thing in single channel and it was fine until it just got old and needed an upgrade.
It could be the board, it could be the RAM, and it could be a fauly memory controller on your CPU. Although, if this was a while ago (pre-2003 for AMD, pre-2008 for intel) then the memory controller would be on the ASRock board.
In other words, a nightmare to diagnose.
Interesting. I actually read stuff like that related to Asrock boards and never used them. Sounds like I made the right choice.
I have used a handful of their mid-to-high end motherboards (relative to their product range) and they have never caused any major issues. This is obviously only anecdotal, though.
Yeah, and to be fair IIRC, this was one of their low-end boards. My dumbass built it on the fucking quadcore Celeron instead of the Core2Duo that just came out because I figured 4 has gotta be better than 2, right? But I was also, like, 14 and the most demanding game I played was Counter-Strike.