Double trouble

This week I was quite excited. As briefly mentioned here, recently I've ordered last piece of the puzzles: hard drives and memory.  I was expecting delivery of everything next couple of days and my configuration should be finally completed. Yup, it took me more than month from first order up to today. Amazing, how fast time flows, huh?

Just to be on the safe side I've ordered 4x 16GB DDR3 from motherboard HCL. I didn't think about it too much, I took cheapest ones - Kingston KVR16R11D4/16. At very beginning I thought that I'm gonna go for 2x32, but apparently 4x16 costs as much as 1x32. With 16GB DIMMS my mainboard would have 128G capacity, which seems to be good enough for foreseeable future. Interestingly enough, one delivered DIMM was slightly different then another, but at the end I con't care about colors as long as it works. Added to my current 16GB will be 80GB in total. Sweet.

Having in mind my previous experience with memory seating I opened up my manual and started to populate slots. Have to say that this single-notch dimm sockets are crazy Idea. Done, power up, and? You got it. Stuck in b7. Again. After a few hours of playing with DIMMs I gave up. Looks like every single one works perfectly on its own. I managed to have working 64G configuration, but I've noticed that there are some slots on my motherboard which simply does not accept memory at all - when something is inserted it ends up with b7/b0 code.

I reported this to ASUS and to be honest - I'm very satisfied how they handled this issue. After a few e-mails exchanged we agreed on motherboard replacement. Just to make it short - I'm expecting delivery of new mainboard tomorrow and I reported it two days ago. It should be normaln - why I am so happy? Well, I'm not business customer and I was afraid that they push me back through normal warranty process meaning talking to supplier and sending motherboard back, then waiting for at least two weeks for replacement. Special thanks to Pawel from ASUS for helping me out. And - by the way - ASUS suspects damaged CPU pin or DIMM slots.

All in all after I gave up with memory I ended up with working 64G configuration and I decided to go ahead and install hard drives - hoping that I will solve this memory issue later. Disks arrived wrapped up with bubble envelope and it was quite surprising to me but well, I explained it to myself - they know what they send and how to handle it. I couldn't be more wrong. After connecting I noticed excessive vibrations and noise. 1st thought was OMFG - I've never seen so noisy hard drives before!

Then I realized that it must be something wrong with drives. I pull it out of the case again. See it yourself...

Damaged badly. Again, back to the supplier. They agreed on replacement. Thats good. No delivery blame game. Bad thing is that I'm kinda stuck for at least another week now.

In the mean time I'll try to finally setup or at least design some basic virtual lab topology. And yeah, test my SSD, cause it seems to be a little bit slower than promised. Hopefully not another subject to replacement. Stay tuned!