eh, I bet you are wrong. I've run memtest many times, often for days, and it never detected any bitflips in RAM. And memtest is specifically designed to exerci

eh, I bet you are wrong. I've run memtest many times, often for days, and it never detected any bitflips in RAM. And memtest is specifically designed to exercise every bit of memory and detect bitflips. While I've seen my share of PCs with memory errors, when you see one you replace memory / tweak settings, and then run memtest for a day or so to ensure it does not reappear. Also, "unused memory" should not be a thing in modern PC: the read cache should expand to fill it - it's super fast to evict and provides tangible benefits in case of hit. The errors usually occur on the boundaries - like in the network or in the SATA connection to disk or even in USB bus. For example the original "ZFS corruption" story (which seems t be gone from regular web, but I think its [0]) pretty clearly mentions damage "on the way to disk". [0] https://web.archive.org/web/20091212132248/http://blogs.sun.com/elowe/entry/zfs_saves_the_day_ta https://web.archive.org/web/20091212132248/http://blogs.sun....