Diagnosing defective RAM

All server and computing components can and will fail eventually, but there are a few pieces of hardware that seem to fail more often than others. Fans, power supplies, and hard disks definitely make the list of common things administrators will end up replacing, but defective memory is also a situation I'm sure you'll run into eventually.

Although memory sticks becoming defective is something that could happen, I made it the last section in this chapter because unfortunately I can't give you a definitive list of symptoms to look out for that indicate that memory is the source of an issue. RAM issues are very mysterious in nature, and each time I've run into one, I've always stumbled across memory being bad only after troubleshooting everything else. It's for this reason that nowadays I'll often test the memory on a server or workstation first, since it's very easy to do. Even if memory has nothing to do with an...