A bit over 20 years ago I had a PC with a memory stick that had gone bad, but not bad enough that it was crashing all the time ... it crashed often enough running windows 98 apps that I attributed all crashes to software nonsense.
Back then it was recommended to run a defragger every so often, so I set up a cron job to run it every Saturday night or something like that. The net result was that every file block that got moved made a trip through memory with some small probability of getting corrupted. Often the errors were in files that weren't used that often so I didn't immediately notice. The net result is that after many months of this, I started noticing PDF files that were corrupted, or mp3 files that would hiccup in the middle even though it used to play perfectly before. Sadly, I had ripped my 500-ish CD collection and then had gotten rid of the physical CDs.
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A bit over 20 years ago I had a PC with a memory stick that had gone bad, but not bad enough that it was crashing all the time ... it crashed often enough running windows 98 apps that I attributed all crashes to software nonsense.
Back then it was recommended to run a defragger every so often, so I set up a cron job to run it every Saturday night or something like that. The net result was that every file block that got moved made a trip through memory with some small probability of getting corrupted. Often the errors were in files that weren't used that often so I didn't immediately notice. The net result is that after many months of this, I started noticing PDF files that were corrupted, or mp3 files that would hiccup in the middle even though it used to play perfectly before. Sadly, I had ripped my 500-ish CD collection and then had gotten rid of the physical CDs.