Original Post:
> I've heard rumours circulating that SIMMs with Toshiba DRAM
> have trouble in Sparc 5's. Any corroboration?
Summary:
Yes, the Sparc 5's are VERY picky about which SIMMs it can
use. We had good and bad luck with Toshiba RAM. We had
good and bad luck with Samsung RAM.
The bottom line: you have to screen EACH SIMM. In other
words, there isn't really an approved manufacturer. Even
the approved manufacturer's SIMMs may not work.
There is a patch, 101508-07, for which one of the bugs fixed
is 1176458, "Excessive memory errors causing Asynchronous
memory fault panics". We applied it, but who knows if it
really works...
Note, the manufacturer quoted above is the manufacturer
of the CHIPs themselves. That is, you could buy SIMMs from
Dataram, Centon, Sun, etc., with the RAM manufacturer's
listed above.
The real bottom line: make sure you get an unconditional
warranty on your SIMM purchase. Unfortunately, a "working"
SIMM may not work in YOUR machine. We worked closely with
Centon, they were happy to make it right.
Thanks to:
Ron Hall <thorn@cc.mcgill.ca>
Gustavo Vegas <gustavo@Microchip.COM>
Andrew Edwards <Andrew_Edwards.wgc-e@rx.xerox.com>
-- -- Eric William Burger -- Eric.Burger@telecnnct.com -- -- The Telephone Connection -- Tel. +1 301/417-0700 -- -- 15200 Shady Grove Road -- Fax. +1 301/417-0707 -- -- Rockville, MD 20850 -- U.S.A. --LONG RESPONSES:
Ron Hall: Yup I can confirm that. Two machines shipped same day arrived same day. One had bad SIMMS one did not.
Gustavo Vegas: Sections from message <9411092138.AA09121@telecnnct.com> read: >I've heard rumours circulating that SIMMs with Toshiba DRAM >have trouble in Sparc 5's. Any corroboration? > We have had problems with Toshiba-based SIMMS for Sparc 5's. The SIMMS in question were manufactured by Kingston, and they have started shipping SIMMS with other brand of chips. I do not know about Sun-distributed SIMMS. We have not had any problems with the base memory included on the SS5's.
Andrew Edwards:
Eric
I had a problem with 32 MB SIMMS in a Model 85 Sparc 5. I do not know who manufactured the SIMMS but they exhibited an asynchronous memory fault that caused the system to dump core and reboot. The patch I used was 101508-06 or 07 if that does not work.
Jeff Victor: On Wed, 9 Nov 1994, Eric William Burger wrote:
> I've heard rumours circulating that SIMMs with Toshiba DRAM > have trouble in Sparc 5's. Any corroboration?
My SS5 should arrive next week: please let me know what you learn via summary or e-mail.
Thanks!
Randy Olsson ISG: I have a sparc 5 running Solaris 2.3 and the 2.3Recommended patches. I run Sybase SQL server 10.1 on it. I had poor performance with 16MB of RAM so I upgraded it to 64MB of RAM. When I did this, Sybase started having all kinds of problems. Anything over 16MB seemed to cause problems. I tried 32MB, 48MB, and 64MB. I have run diagnostics and no errors are detected. I also configured a completely different set of hardware (sparc 5, disks, and all) and ran into the same problem with the new machine. It seems that Sybase will not run on the sparc 5 with more than 16MB of RAM. I tried a sparc 10 with 32MB RAM and it works fine. Any clues?
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