After 12 different examples on these forums within a year, I might have to stop adding to the list. I hope people get the point by now.
Memtests are free. They don’t require effort and can be done overnight. They can diagnose if RAM is failing[1] or if there’s a memory setting in the BIOS that needs to be changed. If multiple passes reveal no issues, then you can confidently move on to the next steps of troubleshooting a problem.
There’s very little cost to running a memtest. We recommend people “burn-in” their drives, which takes much longer than running a memtest. What’s the harm in letting a memtest run overnight to make sure your RAM is 100% healthy?
Burn-ins, scrubs, SMART tests, memtests. We all strive for data integrity, stable systems, and peace of mind.
In case you’re wondering, yes: ECC RAM can fail too. ↩︎