Introduction

My R230 orginally came with two 4GB sticks of memory installed. This served fine for all of the services that I transfered over from my previous server. This is all fine until I want to try testing other services. With 8GB and multiple virtual machines, it was time to add more memory.

Finding the Right Sticks

I thought that finding DDR4 for my server would’ve easy. It was quite easy to find DDR3 for my R720’s and I could pick and choose from many sellers. This was not the case for DDR4, or at least the DDR4 that I needed. I didn’t really care about speed that much as the server was only for a homelab. The Dell R230 requires UDIMM ECC modules and can’t use anything else including RDIMMS. I checked Delta Server Store as they were one of the sources I saw for DDR3. They did have DDR4 memory for sale at a reasonable price, but unfortunately it wasn’t compatible. I checked eBay and Kijiji for used memory and found one decent eBay listing. It was for a 4GB Adata module of ECC UDIMM DDR4. The price wasn’t bad, but the shipping was brutal. My last resort was to check Amazon, and surprisingly, TimeTec Hynix memory was a reasonable price. The modules came in sizes of 8GB or 16GB. Since the R230 maxed out at 64GB, I decided to go with two 16GB sticks, so if I needed more memory in the future, I’d only need to replace my 4GB modules.

Installing the Memory

The installation was as easy as removing the cover and inserting the sticks. The hard part was testing it to ensure that everything functioned fine. Since my Pi-Hole server ran off my R230, I had lost all of my ad blocking capabilites for as long as it was down. I booted MemTest86 off my Ventoy USB and ran a memory test. I left it running for two hours and it finished one of the four passes. It seemed this would take much longer than I thought. I decided to cancel the test as it already passed once and to run a LifeCycle system diagnostic as I knew that would be faster. The test was indeed faster, but it still took quite a bit of time. Luckily there were no issues found throughout the entire server.

Conclusion

This upgrade seemed like a very quick and easy one. It was at first, but checking the memory took much longer than I thought. This meant that quite a few of my services were down for a while. This was worth the time though as I can now test and run many more services in the future.