"I'm an experienced engineer, with a hardware background. I run/administer 17 computers at my business.
I started buying memory from Crucial in 2000. Good quality, quick (free) delivery, and decent prices. Wow, has THAT changed! In the past few years, I have had 5 sets of memory boards go bad. Their quality has gone waaay down. Delivery is no longer quick, just cheap, and they don't pack the delicate memory boards in boxes to protect them from UPS. I'm sure I've seen failures because the memory was banged, smashed, dropped, and Crucial now sends memory in a basic UPS shipping envelope. That's not enough protection for tiny BGA SMT assemblies (look it up). Their prices are no better than the local MicroCenter, so from now on, I'm going there for my memory and SSDs, where I can at least examine the package the product came in to see if it was smashed, dropped, etc. To top it off, when they replace defective memory, they "may" substitute refurbished product for the new product you paid for. This means that a product worked for a moment on their memory test machine, but it doesn't mean that it is reliable, nor does it mean that there wasn't latent damage from being abused, or shipped, earlier."