Can a bad RAM module cause problems?
LUKS and dm-crypt can give the RAM quite a workout, especially when combined with software RAID. In particular the combination RAID5 + LUKS + XFS seems to uncover RAM problems that never caused obvious problems before. Symptoms vary, but often the problem manifest itself when copying large amounts of data, typically several times larger than your main memory. Side note: One thing you should always do on large data copy/movements is to run a verify, for example with the “-d” option of “tar” or by doing a set of MD5 checksums on the source or target with find . -type f -exec md5sum \{\} \; > checksum-fileand then a “md5sum -c checksum-file” on the other side. If you get mismatches here, RAM is the primary suspect. A lesser suspect is an overclocked CPU. I have found countless hardware problems in verify runs after copying or making backups. Bit errors are much more common than most people think. Some RAM issues are even worse and corrupt structures in one of the layers. This typically re
