I've been using computers for more than 40 years now and the one component I have never seen fail is RAM.

All the other bits in a computer I've seen fail.

I've had a RAM stick fail.

Granted, I've been building my own computer for 30 years and I've only seen it happen ONCE.

But I've seen plenty of other failures:

- Two hard drives -- One got dropped on the floor, so it was no surprise, the other was showing degraded performance and SMART showed some scary numbers and I was able to replace it before I lost data.

- One GPU, replaced under warranty.

- One AIO water cooler, replaced under warranty. Somehow, the water vanished from the loop. I'm guessing a microscopic leak that evaporated as fast as it leaked.

- Two power supplies -- One randomly exploded. Just started making popping noises and shooting sparks out the back. At autopsy, I determined that the fan failed (it was hard to spin manually) and it overheated. The other was just being overloaded. I had just gotten a new GPU and the PSU wasn't big enough for it.

- Several case fans.

Never seen a CPU or motherboard failure, even when my AIO water cooler was failing and my CPU was constantly at thermal limits. Never had an SSD/NVMe failure.

Anecdotally, RAM failures are more common than they used to be in previous decades, I assume due to increased capacities and smaller process nodes. Looser manufacturing standards may also play a part.

The component category I've never seen fail is CPU.

Most devices never test their memory and don’t have ecc, so you generally never know. Random instability can be fixed by restarting and your program not being in an area with bad bits anymore.

I had a 2012 mac book pro that burned out 2 different crucial memory sticks. Would have bricked the machine if it was the soldered-on type, but it was the last model apple sold that have swappable memory. Crucial had a lifetime warranty so they replaced them for free.

I used to game on it and I think the design just couldn't handle the cpu and dgpu being active for long periods, it would get extremely hot in the area close to where the memory was.

You may literally be the only one.

I recently had part of a 32 gig DIMM go bad on a 128 gig system. One of the larger VMs was spontaneously rebooting for no apparent reason. I was able to find the addresses with MemTest86 and map out 512 megs of the affected DIMM with the Linux kernel memmap option.

Well, you’re lucky. I had to change laptop memory sticks a few times. Though not since they are soldered directly to the motherboard

on older PC bios would perform a memory test - you may remember those - and that's where it would mark a bunch of pages dead/unusuable and it was not uncommon at all.

Same, it's either bad to begin with or it's basically immortal.

This isn’t true anymore beginning with DDR4 speeds.

Interesting, I've had two fail already in much shorter time. One was brand new, another quite old.

I've seen some fail. Might have had to do with the fact that the computers were literally flooded (river came up faster than the sandbaggers could keep up) while running.

I've had a few RAM sticks fail, but the ECC usually caught it first. Also had one case that somehow the stick slightly unseated itself; dunno how but it was out of service for months until someone opened it up and reseated the stick.

...granted though I've also seen a backpane on a server fail. I didn't think that was even possible until that point.

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