Can third-party memory ruin my hard drive?

Question

Sorry this is a wee bit off topic, but since (a) I am more likely to get a straight answer from people here, and (b) I've already brought this problem up before, I'm going to ask..
I have 2 identical laptops. We bought both for the lab about 2 years ago. They are G4 ppc. I bought an extra half gig of memory for each at the time of purchase, but I think it is from ramjet, not Apple.
Both drives failed within a few weeks of one another. The second one came back from Apple today with a snotty message saying that the third-party memory had caused the problem and that they will refuse to do a repair if we ever send them a computer in the future with a third-party memory chip in it.
This strikes me as absolute horse-shiite, but then again, maybe I am not aware of something I should be.

Answer 1

The letter states "During the testing process, it was
determined that a part Apple has not approved for use
with your product resulted in your product's failure.
When the part was removed, your product successfully
passed all Apple diagnostic and reliability tests"
(then it checks RAM in the space provided."
(A new hard drive, which is 15 GB larger than the
original, was put in, along with an obsolete version
of OS X. One has to wonder why the drive was
replaced if removing the memory resulted in all tests
being passed.)
It has been well documented that Mac memory meet strict requirements because of very tight timing and sync on the MLB... memory with sloppy gating (inconsistent timing) will cause read/write errors on HDs and that it can cause corruption in the boot record and index sectors... this in turn can cause the drive to seek for data trying to fix itself and excessively work the drive and shorten it's MTBF. So, Indirectly... cause damage... sorta... but not like taking a hammer to it.. You basically got a form letter.. but the memory that you are using may be causing some problems and contributing to problems on your HD. Even if your system may not call for matched memory if you always stick to using matched sticks, (especially the speeds, not just size) you will save your self a bunch of headaches in the long run. Pull any 3rd party memory before sending it in for repair... you don't always get the system back with the same sticks (even if they weren't officially replaced.
OS9 was problematic in this similar reguard... I went thru 3 HDs before figuring out that an extension conflict was the cause of my data being hosed on my old Performa. (Apple had replaced all components at least once and I was still having problems until I killed the offending extension).