What are the chances that 2 sticks of ram would both fail? These are 8gb Corsair vengeance ddr4-3200 being ran in a rehoused Asus prebuilt (i5-6400, H110i motherboard, generic 300W PSU).

My BTRFS cache pool was having corruption errors and a lot of things were going wrong and I thought it was from an unclear shutdown, and was about to reformat the cache pool. I also just upgraded to 7.2

But I figured I’d run memtest86, even though I used this RAM on a different computer and didn’t have problems (from what I could tell)

But every memtest I run is throwing failed tests regardless of configuration.

It seems unlikely that both sticks would randomly fail. Should I bother buying new RAM? looking at prices, I could buy another PC used with the same specs or perhaps better for about the same price (and maybe have better NICs, lower power usage, etc)

7 hours ago, jornNER said:

It seems unlikely that both sticks would randomly fail.

I agree, recommend retesting with a different stick first, like from another PC.

Other things to check:

• Inspect DRAM sockets on motherboard, connections are not bent or dirty/full of dust, DRAM snaps firmly into sockets.

• Remove CPU, clean/inspect socket and CPU connections.

A poor connection between the CPU and DRAM module can result in what you are seeing.

1 hour ago, ConnerVT said:

Other things to check:

• Inspect DRAM sockets on motherboard, connections are not bent or dirty/full of dust, DRAM snaps firmly into sockets.

• Remove CPU, clean/inspect socket and CPU connections.

A poor connection between the CPU and DRAM module can result in what you are seeing.

Unfortunately I tested the ram sticks on a different machine entirely with the Windows memory diagnostic and they both failed. That computer has 2 sticks of the same ram that do not fail.

I’m in the process of RMAing the bad ram sticks. But Im worried the NAS will destroy the replacement ram. I would try the 2 healthy ram sticks from the other computer if not for the concern.

The other possibility is that because these sticks were originally in the other computer (For 4xgb total sticks), that they got fried in that machine somehow, since it’s a more powerful PC that I was fiddling with (Running XMP etc).

That was also using all 4 ram slots, so perhaps the stress on the memory controller damaged these particular sticks somehow? They were both pulled from the matching dual channel slots (dimm_a2 / dimm_b2)

Edited November 2, 2025Nov 2 by jornNER

7 hours ago, JorgeB said:

I agree, recommend retesting with a different stick first, like from another PC.

I am concerned about damaging the healthy sticks I have in my other PC, because I instead tried the problematic sticks in that PC with the Windows memory diagnostic and they failed there as well.

Is this too paranoid? I mean it proves that the sticks are definitely now failing irrespective of what computer they’re in, but the question is if the NAS machine will kill other ram I put in it. I’m in the process of RMAing the 2 bad ram sticks, and if they approve (which maybe they won’t, because it’s 2 sticks), I’m worried the replacements will see the same fate.

The generic PSU is from the original pre-built, and it is about 10 years old at this point. Is that a possible source? I don’t see other problems other than the ram failure, however

Edited November 2, 2025Nov 2 by jornNER

Okay I found the original 8gb stick of ram from the original pre-built the NAS is built from, so I tried it and it’s not throwing any errors in memtest. I’ll see if that changes after some usage