RAM degradation

Thinking out loud answer:

I think RAM probably does degrade, because it is subject to the same environmental wear and tear as HDDs are, but semiconductors (RAM) are functionally eternal when looked at in the scope of normal product lifespan. My idea that RAM is subject to the wear and tear of existence probably comes from reading about ECC memory and the reasons behind that technology on Wikipedia:

Electrical or magnetic interference inside a computer system can cause a single bit of dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) to spontaneously flip to the opposite state. It was initially thought that this was mainly due to alpha particles emitted by contaminants in chip packaging material, but research has shown that the majority of one-off soft errors in DRAM chips occur as a result of background radiation, chiefly neutrons from cosmic ray secondaries, which may change the contents of one or more memory cells or interfere with the circuitry used to read/write them. Hence, the error rates increase rapidly with rising altitude; for example, compared to the sea level, the rate of neutron flux is 3.5 times higher at 1.5 km and 300 times higher at 10–12 km (the cruising altitude of commercial airplanes). As a result, systems operating at high altitudes require special provision for reliability.

I'm extrapolating from this that there are other universal forces which end up being slowly destructive to microscopic and highly complex systems like semiconductors, but I could be totally wrong.

From another angle, traditional HDDs are made from a collection of technologies, and have movings parts, which probably wear out faster than semiconductors. This idea seems to be supported by this article:

http://www.extremetech.com/computing/170748-how-long-do-hard-drives-actually-live-for

The biggest reason we probably, as a culture, don't think of RAM as degradable in the same way as HDDs is because when HDDs go bad, you lose your data and I think people talk about that more often and with different (and probably more emotive) language, whereas when your RAM goes bad, we end up hearing about a "broken computer", and the problem is readily fixed by swapping out a bad stick for a good stick, because RAM is fungible, a term I just learned from Crash Course Philosophy:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-TFCMK4i2lo&index=18&list=PL8dPuuaLjXtNgK6MZucdYldNkMybYIHKR

Hope that helped, or at least made you think of other fun questions to be answered!