A review of Crucial's Lifetime Warranty for RAM

First off, hope this is an appropriate place to post this. Recently had some Crucial RAM that failed after four years, and was pleased to see that Crucial has a lifetime warranty on their RAM. Wanted to leave a review of their RMA process as I thought it might be useful to some.

1) Initial RMA request: Pretty standard. Took about 2 days of emails (their reps are pretty clearly overseas) to get an RMA authorization. They asked for the receipt, my hardware, and steps I had taken to verify that it was the RAM that was defective.

2) Processing: Crucial told me that once the RAM was received it wouldt take 10 business days to process the RMA. I emailed them on the 10th day for a status update and they told me that they had received it, but apparently it hadn't been processed yet.

After 15 days, I emailed again. They asked me to provide a tracking number for the package. Why would they need this if they had already confirmed receipt? After a few more emails (I told them I discarded the tracking after they told me they received it), they told me that they had received the RAM.

Before starting the process I had found a post on Reddit (https://www.reddit.com/r/buildapc/comments/u0hwbu/need\_help\_crucial\_keeps\_delaying\_my\_ram\_rma/) where a user stated that Crucial told them they hadn't received their RMA when they actually had. I figured this was a one-off, but it seems possible that they could be deliberately doing this.

3) Replacement: The RAM being warrantied was a set of 32GB 3600mhz CL16 DDR4. Crucial told me that this was no longer being produced, and offered me two replacement options, both of which were 32GB 3200mhz CL22, a significant downgrade. I asked them if they could refund me instead so that I could purchase RAM from another manufacturer. They offered me a coupon for use on their own website with a 90 day expiration for $61.99. (Not very useful since they no longer make any performance DDR4.) I then asked if they could possibly make up for the downgrade by giving me 64gb instead of 32gb. They would not do this. I have elected to take the downgraded RAM and give it a try.

Overall thoughts: If I had known that the process was going to be like this, I probably would have just tossed the RAM and purchased some new sticks of comparable performance to my old ones. Not the worst warranty experience, but in my case probably not worth the time and shipping expense. I give this warranty process a 5/10.