Mixing RAM brands question

TrueNAS General
1

OK, I’ll start with…I know, ECC would be better…

Anyway, I have (2) crucial 16gb ddr4-3200 sticks installed right now. I have access to (2) g.skill 16gb ddr4-3200 sticks. would mixing these be likely to cause any issues?

I may have access to (4) g.skill sticks but would need to trade the crucial for the other two g.skill sticks.

if mixing is not a problem, it would be significantly less hassle. ATM, all I am running is jellyfin and some SMB shares so my ram usage is generally showing >20gb available.

I currently do not have any systems running 4 sticks of ram and have not for a long time so I really am not sure about current pitfalls with doing so (other than when I was looking into ram for my main system, it seemed 4 sticks run slower than 2 so I stuck with 2x32 there. my NAS started as a salvage build, then I replaced the motherboard and cpu, added a bunch of drives and I think the only thing left from the original plan is the RAM.

2

Having different pairs of identical modules in different RAM channels is probably not an issue. Try… and run a few passes of MemTest :wink:

3

As long as timings and frequency are identical it shouldn’t be a problem, but I wouldn’t mix a cl16 kit with a cl14, cl18 or cl22

4

IMHO different timings/frequency are not such a big problem, unless you try to force slower modules to run faster :smile: the most common behaviour is that in training phase the morhterboard will stabilizes at values ​​digestible by all modules (some high end motherboard will disable a channel that can prevent from boot at all).
What can instead lead more problem (especially when reaching the max supported ram amount) is most mixing different capacity module in the same channel (not your case), and different density module (single with dual rank).

BTW if memtest or winnie say everyting ok, you are ok :smile: