The ReadyNAS Memory Test
February 5th, 2010
| Tags: readynas
When Netgear says they added a “comprehensive memory test that you can run”, they aren’t kidding. It’s an eight phase process which takes a good 2 hours (for a 1 GB chip). And, you need to run it twice.
Which ReadyNAS do yo have? I’ve installed a ReadyNAS NV+ at a clients and I really like it. Much nicer then my Buffao TeraStation (lot more expensive too).
I picked the ReadyNAS NV over the TerraStation back when Infrant was still in charge. (They’ve since been bought out by Netgear.) Since purchase it has slowly migrated from a single 750 GB drive to a 4×1500 (4.5TB) monster.
From what I’ve read, the NV+ is a little less underpowered for what I like it to do. (MediaServer, BitTorrent client, TiVo server, etc.) Hopefully it is also little less picky about the RAM and other hardware that you can add on.
Why twice?
Why twice?
The instructions say to run it twice because each run of the test only catches 85% of bad memory and running it twice moves the likelihood of catching bad memory up to 97.75%. (Of course more times would move it to 99.66%, 99.95%, 99.99% and so on, but there is a point of diminishing returns.)
I swapped in the conservative Crucial 1GB memory board http://images3a.snapfish.com/232323232%7Ffp73462%3Enu%3D48%3C6%3E%3B%3A2%3E255%3EWSNRCG%3D33%3C%3B%3C24%3A97346nu0mrj and passed this test for operation. I also used LanSpeedTest for both memory configurations and found a small increase in transfer speed across my Ethernet LAN. It was nice to see some improvement but not really worth the money spent on the memory board.