As you guys know (and thanks for sorting me out). I had dodgy ram (still within warranty and fairly new).
So that was RMA’d and I received my replacement 16gig (2 x 8)
Slot the little buggers in and funky stuff starts happening. Long story short. The new ram I received had one very sick puppy of a stick.
So its now on the way back for replacement.
Am I unlucky or is ram really this poor in quality control. Its not an expensive brand, well all ram is expensive, but it certainly isn’t cheap ram.
I had one guy here at work who ordered a batch a number of years ago, I think it was a batch of 8 x 4gb sticks. Over the first year 2 went bad but the rest were good for years. I’ve never had a stick go bad on me in 20 years of building my own PCs and the above story were the only ones that I ran into (caveat: although I build my own PCs, I have relatively little direct exposure to others that do so my sample size is small).
It’s probably just all that focus on the F-111 that is causing the bad RAM. 
My home pc hasn’t had a bad stick that I can recall.
My work pc died pretty hard after about a year.
Most RAM is good enough, even if it’s slow. There is a thing as going too cheap, however.
I have rarely seen RAM die after it’s worked, but I have seen it arrive bad. Could be something as simple as inadequate ESD protection at the source, could be a defect, could be shakes magic 8-ball “signs point to no” ruining it.
Some brands don’t have good reps and for good reason, so I usually stick to brands like Crucial or G Skill that I know are good and then search within their product lineups for what I need.
+1 for g.skill
Had that happen to me with a HDD once. Ordered one, put it in, after few hours it had bad sectors all over the place, tried to fix it but nothing worked. RMAd it, they told me it was indeed shot, sent me a replacement, after a few hours that one showed exactly the same symptoms. Mailed the shop if they were seeing lot’s of RMAs for that HDD type and they said no, so i mailed that one in as well and finally got one that works. Could be that they got a bad batch for a myriad of reasons.
Ive only had two bad sticks of RAM in over 25 years of building my own PC’s.
Thanks for the replies.
Ohh well. See what the replacements are like when they turn up
I well remember the nadir days of the IBM HDD line, the Deskstar, that was so bad we called them Deathstars. You could guarantee that it would fail within a year.
They later sold the whole thing to someone else, Samsung maybe? I forget. The other lame ones were Quantum and Conner. Maxtor was good, WD was good, and Seagate (who bought Connor) was hit or miss.
I remember having a run of HDDs go bad in the late 2000s - we figured that 3 in a row was a sign that something wasn’t right, so we swapped out the PSU and RAM for new ones and the next HDD ran fine for years. It could have been coincidence but then again maybe not. shrugs
I had a dodgy diimm on my last mobo and thought it was the ram. Took some troubleshooting though
RAM could corrupt the data, but not ruin the HDD.
A bad PSU could, though. Irregular power could make it do Very Bad Things internally.