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Re: RN524X RAM upgrade

Dewdman42
Virtuoso

Re: RN524X RAM upgrade

I will if I bother.  I expect a level of 1 is probably about what I want..which probably means only swap if absolutely neccessary, which I would think I should want it to do, but with 16gb it may not have to actually swap ever anyway.

Message 26 of 46
Dewdman42
Virtuoso

Re: RN524X RAM upgrade

Its proving to be more difficult then I thought it would be to find optimal RAM for this machine.

 

   DDR4 SODIMM ECC 1866mhz 

 

1866 memory basically isn't made or sold anymore.

 

In order to get the lowest CL latency at this clock speed (ideall around 15), have to look for 2133mhz memory, which there is very little.  The model that is in my unit mentioned above is no longer in production.  Two times in a row I have ordered through two different sites and each time after about a week they canceled the order for no reason (presumably the real reason is they can't drop ship it because its not produced anymore).  

 

There are some SODIMMS at higher clock speeds, but these all seem to have CL latency around 19..  and/or can't find ECC version.

 

I'm still looking though.

 

I think ECC is probably pretty critical for a file server, so I am sticking with that, but I might have to go for the larger clock speeded RAM, it will not run at that clock speed, it will run at 1866 in the motherboard, but I wonder what the CAS latency would be like in that situation?  When a ram is quoted as having CAS at 19, that does that mean as slower clock speeds it has reduced latency or always high like 19?  Anyone know.  Its common for faster clock speed ram to have a higher latency spec.  If CL19 is all I can get now, that calculates out to 20nanosecond latency, versus 16 nanosecond latency with the currently installed RAM at CL15.  I don't even know how much difference that will make.

 

I have found some non-ECC memory with CL14, but non-ECC is not a good idea here I don't think...

 

still searching...

Message 27 of 46
Dewdman42
Virtuoso

Re: RN524X RAM upgrade

Further to the above post, anyone know how the ReadyNAS BIOS decides what CAS timings to use with the RAM that is installed, if its underclocking down from higher clock ram?  In otherwords, if the ram is let's say 2400mhz with CL19, premsably the BIOS will underclock it to 1866.  Will it also lower the CAS timings below the manfucturers marketed value that normally corresponds to the higher clock speed?  So theoretically, runing 2400mhz CL19 memory on the ReadyNAS might run at 1866mhx CL15-ish?

 

 

Message 28 of 46
Sandshark
Sensei

Re: RN524X RAM upgrade

Every ReadyNAS I have checked has an AMI bios, so I suspect that they do whatever is typical for AMI.

Message 29 of 46
Dewdman42
Virtuoso

Re: RN524X RAM upgrade

Most likely some kind of AUTO setting that determines the CAS latency from the RAM that is inserted.  Without any more information than that my gut feeling is that the CAS would be set to the the spec of the SODIMM's regardless of whether the clock is being underclocked or not.  

 

In theoretical terms, what that means is that if I were to buy more modern memory running at say 2400mhz or 2666mhz, it would downclock for the ReadyNAS mobo, to 1866mhz, but the CAS  would not be adjusted dynamically; and on those newer and "faster" SODIMMS its 25% slower...  around CL19 typically.   That would equate to slower memory (I think), then if I could be using 1866mhz SODIMMS with CAS around CL12, or 2133mhz with CAS around CL15.  2133mhz is what came with my ReadyNas with CAS CL15.  

 

That's theoretical.  I do not know what the practical result would be of increasing CAS latency by 25% to CL19 while not also increasing the clock speed.  Most people say that increased latency of newer RAM is more than made up by the increased clock speed, but in this case where newer RAM is being used in an older mobo that operates at a slower clock speed, the higher latency would cause the overall memory speed to be slower unless the CAS latency is also reduced automatically somehow.  

 

How much slower?  I'm not really sure, but without more information to the contrary I would probably rather stick with my measly 4gb of ram unless I can find some larger SODIMM's that meet the spec and run with clock speed at 2133mhz, CL15, which would be in theory the same speed as what shipped with the unit.

 

Admittedly, I don't understand that much about the hardware, so I would love to hear any other enlightenment on the matter.

 

I am finding it difficult to find absolutely matching SODIMM's, particularly with the ECC requirement.  Its not much problem to get 2400mhz or 2666mhz SODIMM's that would probably work, but possibly slower...that is the question.

 

I did find some Samsung out-of-production SODIMM's that might be around, perhaps on used market...

 

M474A2K43BB1-CPB  = 16gb CL15 ECC SODIMM 2133mhz

M474A2K43BB1-CRC  = same as above at 2400mhz CL17

 

M474A1G43EBI-CPB = 8gb CL15 ECC SODIMM 2133mhz

M474A1G43DBO-CPB = same as above, but slightly older generation.

 

On the lookout for some of those now.

 

Message 30 of 46
Dewdman42
Virtuoso

Re: RN524X RAM upgrade

Ended up ordering 32gb of this:

 

 

Samsung M474A2K43BB1-CPB  = 16gb CL15 ECC SODIMM 2133mhz

Its coming from Hong Kong, but hopefully by next week.  32gb is *WAY* overkill for a readynas, but I figured, what the heck.  It was $170.  I could have probably gotten by just fine with a single 16gb SODIMM, at around $85.  As hard as it was to find and acquire this RAM, I decided to just max it it now, what the heck. 

 

This memory should perform the same as what came installed with the ReadyNAS in terms of speed.

 

It sounds like the memory test built into the ReadyNAS takes a long time to run, and I havce no idea if that will be 8x longer then that even for 32gb, we shall see, so it may be a couple weeks before I can report the final results of this experiment.  But I will.

 

By the way, in case anyone is wondering why I am bothering with this.  I intend to run gitlab on this box, which requires a minimum of 8GB to run without performance problems.  On top of that I also use crashplan which is a memory hog and will be running a wordpress develpment evironment also...  so that means MySQL and PostGres.  All of that on top of sickchill, sabnzbd and Plex.  4GB isn't enough.  16gb would probably be plenty, but anyway, might as well max it out now while i'm at it.

 

I'll let you know how it goes.

 

 

 

Message 31 of 46
Dewdman42
Virtuoso

Re: RN524X RAM upgrade

new memory has arrived.  Installed.  The BOOT MENU memory test is now running...  Anyone have any idea how long this will take, especially since there is now 32GB of ram to test?

 

 

Message 32 of 46
Dewdman42
Virtuoso

Re: RN524X RAM upgrade

Alright, system is up with the new RAM.  I ran the boot menu memory test for about 28 hours, after 4 passes I just restarted the machine because I didn't have time to wait until 28 hours for 8 passes or however many it was going to do.  No errors with 4 passes.

 

The machine is definitely running snappier under heavy loads when Plex, sabnzbd, SickChill, crashplan, gitlab, docker, portainer, wordpress all running.  Before those could easily bog it down, but I'm noticing major improvement in performance to be honest.

 

Htop shows 7gb used memory, and 17gb for Cache (and growing).  zero swap.

 

I think the main difference is that some of these heavy duty apps use a lot of memory and when the memory gets full it slows everythign down, but with all this memory, nothing is slowing down.  Granted, I'm not using multiple users on it, or truly loading up all of these programs at the same time, but what I can see is that there is noticeable better performance especially with gitlab, but also with Plex and crashplan.  I'm very happy with this upgrade.

 

 

Message 33 of 46
Dewdman42
Virtuoso

Re: RN524X RAM upgrade

Well spoke too soon.  Trouble in paradise.  System was working great last night.  During the night the system rebooted for no apparent reason...and just now did it again...  and this time its needing to resync data...

 

gerrr.....

 

stay tuned...

Message 34 of 46
Dewdman42
Virtuoso

Re: RN524X RAM upgrade

So, it appears the ReadyNas cannot handle this memory upgrade after all.  I would like to try to figure out if there is a way to make it work or to resolve if the memory mentioned above is in some way not compatible after all, i hope someone may be able to share their knowledge to troubleshoot.

 

The box panic'd again, the LCD had the following message "led_panic_handler+7d".

 

So first thing, does anyone know if there is a specific meaning to that message which may shed some light??

 

What I can say is that it ran fine for hours, but when I started up gitlab...the CPU's were cranked to 100 while it was starting up and then after a minute or so it kernel panic'd. 

 

My suspicion at the moment is that this may be related to heat. 

 

I might try to remove one of the 2 SODIMM's (reducing memory to 16gb), in hopes that this will reduce the liklihood of that happening due to heat, but first I'd like to see if I can troubleshoot this.

 

Anyone know if there are any other logs I might look at that might shed some light?

 

Will probably let the machine sit for a couple days doing the boot menu mem test, it will take a long time, I guess around 50 hours...  but just to absolutely be sure there is nothing particularly defective with the memory.  

 

 

Message 35 of 46
Dewdman42
Virtuoso

Re: RN524X RAM upgrade

while looking into this, I found out something else extraordinary, the RN524X runs 10-15C cooler when the front door is open!!!  wow.  Not the greatest case design I guess, but I guess most people wouldn't be pushing it like this.

 

I will try running it for a while with the door open to see if it kernel panics this way.  If not, that could point the finger at heat being an issue and something about more RAM must be causing more heat.  I don't know if that means the larger SODIMM's run hotter, or the fact that there are just two SODIMM's in tight quarters...or perhaps the presence of more SODIMM allows the unit's CPU to operate more freely (rather then waiting on Swap a lot), which makes it more efficient, but also maybe hotter and hot enough to cause something like the RAM to not be happy.

 

I've personally not seen the machine shut down from heat safety cutoff, so..  the CPU's aren't getting hot.  There doesn't appear to be a sensor for the SODIMM temps.

 

and have not observed heat over 70C.  It sits running at aaround 67C for the most part with the door closed, and 53C with the door open...so lets's leave it open for a bit and see what happens.

 

Message 36 of 46
powellandy1
Virtuoso

Re: RN524X RAM upgrade

I have had huge issues with the RN524X and heat (and noise) - see https://community.netgear.com/t5/Using-your-ReadyNAS-in-Business/ReadyNAS-524X-CPU-Temperature/m-p/1...

 

In the end I had to turn the fan round so it blew in. It's poorly designed for airflow and has a permenantly stuck CPU with small heatsink.

Message 37 of 46
Dewdman42
Virtuoso

Re: RN524X RAM upgrade

I don’t know if heat is the issue or not in this case. I removed one of the sodimms hoping that would increase airflow around the memory, but I can still get the machine to reboot after a while by loading up processes. Sometimes it reports panic and sometimes not. I am not able to be looking at the temp at the moment it happens but it seems to be running with door open and some decent load at around 65c which is not that unreasonable. There are no memory temp monitors so no idea about that. It’s weird to me that the memory reported no errors and can run for hours without problems and then after a while, perhaps when certain intensive things are happening the machine will panic or reboot out of nowhere.

Running out of ideas here now...
Message 38 of 46
Dewdman42
Virtuoso

Re: RN524X RAM upgrade

Does anyone here think there is any reason that 2Rx8 SODIMM's would not work in the RN524X, as opposed to the 1Rx8 SODIMM that came in it?

 

I'm trying to decide if i should try out some other memory modules first before giving up on this.  I am wondering if dual rank (ie, 2R), versus single rank (1R) might be a factor to why the box is panicing or rebooting for no reason and unpredictably.   Either that or else 16gb per SODIMM is still some kind of problem.  The ones I tried were 2Rx8 in 16gb per module.  And like I said... No errors during memory test, seems to run fine on normal boot for hours at a time, then something casues it to occasionally have a problem and kernel panic sometimes or reboot abnormally, particularly under load.

 

Thinking about trying 8gb module size, but I can still only find that in 2Rx8.  This is much more commonly found out there.  I can't find any 1Rx8 at all now.  Makes me wonder what Netgear is sourcing for currently sold RN524X units.

 

 

 

Message 39 of 46
Sandshark
Sensei

Re: RN524X RAM upgrade

For DDR3 and above, it rarely matters.  And it's also not normally the number of ranks that's a problem unless the board just can't handle that much (doesn't seem to be the issue).  When it does matter, it's normally the data path width per chip (the X8 vs X4) that matters.

Message 40 of 46
Dewdman42
Virtuoso

Re: RN524X RAM upgrade

matters how?

 

Do you have any theories about why this SODIMM is not 100% working ok?  It matches the specs I was given.  Passes memory test, works fine for hours then fails under load...

 

 

Message 41 of 46
Sandshark
Sensei

Re: RN524X RAM upgrade

Perhaps looking through the logs will pinpoint an error source.  The only thing is that I don't know how to get the logs for the previous power cycle (where the problem occurred), just the current one (where there may be a clue, but it may be more subtle).

Message 42 of 46
Dewdman42
Virtuoso

Re: RN524X RAM upgrade

I downloaded all the logs and some of them go back before the last reboot. But I haven’t been able to find anything so far just poking around in them.

If the problem is a kernel panic there probably won’t be anything there.

So I went to remove the one sodimm and go back to my original memory but I wanted to run a memory test again on the new sodimm first. This time the memory test on that sodimm did not go very long, less then five minutes and reboot without warning. It did that twice in a row. Do something is not right there, could not even run the test. Mind you it ran for nearly 24 hours booted up prior to that, so this is all very strange.

Hmm

So I swapped the modules and the memory test in that one is still running. It’s quite possible one of the modules was in fact bad. But I would have thought the memory tester would have reported errors rather then just rebooting the box spontaneously.

Stay tuned. In the meantime if anyone had any theories about these problems please advise
Message 43 of 46
Sandshark
Sensei

Re: RN524X RAM upgrade

The test itself must, of course, run out of RAM.  So, it crashing isn't all that odd if the memory is bad.

Message 44 of 46
Dewdman42
Virtuoso

Re: RN524X RAM upgrade

well swapped the modules and so far it has passed 24 hours of memory testing and I booted it up and have been running pretty much all the stuff the loaded up the machine before...and so far....it has not restarted..  So..  hopefully that's all it is, one of the modules was maybe bad, even though somehow the memory test actually passed when both modules were installed.   

 

So far so good.  16gb...running everything a little better.  I

Message 45 of 46
Dewdman42
Virtuoso

Re: RN524X RAM upgrade

Alright just wanted to report back again, the machine has been running great for a week with just the one good module installed, so all is good now, the memory was spec'd fine.  The important point there was that one of the modules was/is faulty and the boot menu memory test did not spot that after running 25 hours with both modules installed.  It did find come up more directly as a problem when running the boot menu memtest with just the one faulty module installed, the tester didn't spot it, but it crashed within 5 minutes after starting the test, two times in a row.  And with that module installed (or both), the machine would boot up and run for a while, for hours..then spotaneously crash at some point, usually under some kind of CPU load...forcing a raid resync everytime, which was concerning to be honest, hopefully the data was not compromised, but anyway...  seems to be sailing smooth now with just one 16gb module installed (see spec above).  The faulty one has been sent back to HK for a refund.  16gb is more then enough anyway, I didn't really need 32gb.

 

So what performance differences do I notice after a week running smooth?

 

  1. a lot more caching memory is available and I notice that when I mount the raid from my mac over SMB, it is able to retrieve the folder contents list of certain folders with thousands of files, MUCH faster then before.  This must be because that information is getting cached more now.  However, i also notice that SMB process seems to run a little bit every once in a while to build that cache again when it needs to.  But before I often had to wait minutes to open a folder and wait to see the conents (7000 files).  Now it is often immediate.
  2. Before I had to setup a cron job to start crashplan and midnight and stop it in the morning because it was using nearly all of the factory 4gb memory.  Now I can easily leave it running all day long and it barely causes the CPU to blink.
  3. Before gitlab was pretty much unusable with only 4gb of memory.  Gitlab specs a need for 8gb+, and gitlab now runs perfectly fine and leaving it running all day, once it starts up, the CPU is having no problems.
  4. I am able to have up and running at all times gitlab+postgres, docker, portainer, crashplan, wordpress+MySQL, qdirStat, sabnzbd, sickchill and plex.  No problems with memory, its using most of time only about 6gb of memory, and a nice large cache.

I do not think most people need to upgrade the memory on this box.  I did so mainly to run gitlab, and also because crashplan was pushing it to the limit.  What I can say is that if you have more advanced needs and are creatively using this box for stuff like I am, then its a pretty easy upgrade, once you locate the memory (not easy) and presuming the memory is not bad..which I might have just got unlucky that time.

 

Marking this thread as solved.

 

 

Message 46 of 46
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