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I have a PowerEdge 1950 for non mission-critical usage that I'm planning to upgrade with more RAM.
From my understand the RAM provided are ECC-buffered. May I know would it be compatible with non-ECC RAMs?
What should I look out for when upgrading RAMs for server?
user4127
Posted 2014-01-02T06:25:44.967
Reputation: 109
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You should use either all ECC or all non-ECC DIMMs. Likewise, they should all either be registered or unbuffered. Mixing ECC with non-ECC or registered with unbuffered is not generally supported, although some systems will let you run ECC memory in non-ECC mode. If the server already has some RAM that you want to use, check whether it is ECC and/or registered, and buy RAM that matches those specs.
You should refer to your owner's manual (available on Dell's website) for exact compatibility specifications. For example, in addition to the ECC and registered/unbuffered options, the server may only support up to a certain capacity for single- or dial-ranked DIMMs, but may support higher-capacity quad-ranked DIMMs. Note that the supported clock speeds for dual-ranked vs. quad-ranked may also differ.
Also note that sometimes the order in which you install the DIMMs is important. I recently upgraded a T310 server from 8 GB to 24 GB and had to move the existing 4 GB RDIMMs from slots 1 and 3 to slots 2 and 6, because the server would hang during POST when I installed the new 8 GB RDIMMs in slots 2 and 6.
If you don't want to do any research and just want to buy something that's guaranteed to work in the server, you can use Crucial's Memory Advisor.
rob
Posted 2014-01-02T06:25:44.967
Reputation: 13 188
Have you tried looking in the manual? – rob – 2014-01-02T06:44:31.730
http://www.dell.com/downloads/global/products/pedge/en/pe_1950_III_spec_sheet.pdf Spec Sheet, you want to make sure you match RAM Speed to what it takes. – Vladimir Oselsky – 2014-01-02T21:21:07.783