16Gb Makes for a LONG POST

Power On Self-Test that is...

I was fortunate enough to slam 16G of RAM into one of my spare Dell PowerEdge servers today at work (school). It runs Microstank Windows Server 2008 64-bit, and can use every bit of memory I can put into it. Problem is, it took over 10 minutes to POST for the first time. Reboots since then have been considerably faster.

One of the most significant performance increases you can perform on ANY computer is to increase the amount of memory it contains. I purchased 16G of REGISTERED ECC memory for my server for under $400. Anyone running XP or Vista 32-bit should have 4G installed in their computer. Period. Windows will only take advantage of 3.5G (approx) so it is best to install the fastest memory your computer can use in matched pairs. Your computer will love you for it. The system 'may' make use of the other 512M or so, but it depends heavily on the motherboard. No use getting memory that is faster than what your motherboard will support, the speed limit is set by the BIOS and you cannot exceed that unless you have a motherboard that supports over-clocking. Best to leave well-enough alone at this point.

I use Kingston memory, they have a memory configurator on their website that works great if you have a name-brand computer. You home-brew guys with hand-made stuff are on your own: If you built your computer from sctratch chances are you already know what memory it will take and what voltage it requires. Personally I try to stick with name-brand stuff because of the warranty. Generally I will replace 1 or 2 things out of the thousands of warranty items I purchase each year.

After I installed the memory into the server, I had to replace one of the drives that had failed. (this is why it was a spare...) The first RAID array is a RAID 1 (mirror set) array, and this particular server has a really nice Dell PERC 4di controller. The drives (6 front-panel drives) are all hot-swapable, and this particular array was 2-146Gb drives mirrored. I had the OS up and running, and I pulled the bad drive. I inserted the new drive (cheap-ass Fujitsu, I normally purchase Seagate drives, but this was a warranty replacement so I shouldn't complain...) and then went to my server administrator software (Dell OpenManage) and tried to tell it to rebuild. It barked at me that it 'cannot start the rebuild process on this drive as the drive is in the process of being rebuilt'. Cool. Truly hot-swapable. Didn't even need to tell it to 'just do it'. To tell you the truth, I didn't even know the drive was failing except that when I fired up this server after we eliminated its need, the OpenManage software informed me there was a problem. Still booted fine, it even allowed me to install the new 64-bit OS. All I had to do is argue with a few towel-headed Dell server 'associates' to get my drive replaced. And they assured me they would be sending out a Seagate replacement. Right. And his real name was 'Bob'...