You are only seeing a performance increase because you were maxing out the stock 2GB's of RAM, which is not normal, and has been brought up in the past by others with the same issue. My memory usage never goes over 54% which is only during data transfer or data streaming, and I have the stock 2GB's. I would love to see a screen shot of cpu-z from your system to see what speed your memory is running at. I am willing to bet it's running at 400MHz, which means it's not running any faster than stock. You just simply ran out of memory with the stock 2GB's, which again, is not normal, but you fixed it by increasing the memory capacity. Running any system at 100% memory usage will make it run slow, so your particular experience is unique, and not a normal occurrence because most people don't need more than 2GB's. In a nutshell, you didn't really see a performance "increase", but instead, you are just finally seeing how your system was *supposed* to run with the stock memory.

Due to this unique and rare occurrence that has been brought to our attention, I will modify my previous statement. If you are not maxing out your stock 2GB's of memory, or are experiencing some other type of unique issue, upgrading to 4GB's will not increase performance, imo, and a better cpu upgrade will give better overall performance instead.

On the other hand, if you are using more than 80% of the stock 2GB's of memory, you will more than likely see a performance increase just by increasing the memory capacity, but do keep in mind that if your MSS is using this much memory, there is an underlying issue that, if found, will resolve your lack of performance for free.

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EX490 w/ a Q9300 processor and stock RAM
Stock Seagate System Drive
(3) 1TB Samsung Spinpoint F3 7200rpm storage pool drives
Gen3 Debug Board (all connections)

Prior to the upgrade I was NOT maxing out the memory. I would occasionally hit 64-75% of memory utilized, but often times I was below that number ~ 58%. My interpretation of this is that the MSS knows its maximum memory limits, be it 2 GB on a stock system or 4 GB when modified. Once it sees what it has to work with then it adjusts accordingly. As you suspected, CPU-Z does show the memory running at 400 MHz, so the effects I'm seeing are definitely NOT due to faster memory.

As for underlying issues, I'm not sure there were/are any. I only have a handful of add-ins installed. I do run SageTV server, but I had disabled Twonky. Since the upgrade I have Squeezebox Server running as well. Outside of running the console or RDPing onto the box I had zero performance issues prior to the upgrade - at least none that I was aware of.

My rationale for doing the upgrade was simply looking at the memory use and asking "what if?" Those of us with the older EX47x hardware can remember when we quadrupled our MSS memory from 512 MB to 2 GB and the performance increase we saw then. So, I figured for $150 why not try going from 2 GB to 4 GB. Was it worth it?? Based on what I've seen I'd say it is a prudent, cost effective thing to do if you have an EX495 because we already have a decent two core processor. Of course a quad core upgrade can change that. If you have an EX490 box, then a processor upgrade AND the memory upgrade might make sense. For the time being, I'm done tinkering with my hardware - I'm more than pleased with my MSS performance.

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X510 w/7 TB (100% WD Green EARS)
Stock Processor, 4 GB Memory Upgrade

More memory allows for more file cache, which could speed up some operations that previously were forced to go to disk. I have to doubt that there would be much of a significant, noticeable improvement, though.

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Alex Kuretz
Remote Notification: Monitoring and alerting for your Home Server via email, Twitter, text message, RSS, push notifications, and on your Mac desktop
Have you tried our Add-Ins?

I would think though that more Memory would help things like the Console cause I know with 2GB, its laggy as hell for me... And something like console isnt processor intensive but it's a lot of going back and forth and pulling up the same information and displaying, something that RAM is built for.

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EX495: 3x1.5TB * MacBook Pro * 27" iMac i7 * Custom PC
64GB iPad 3G * 64GB iPhone 4S * AppleTV * 500GB PlayStation 3 * PlayStation Vita 3G * 1TB Tivo 3
Denon 2807 * 60" Sony SXRD * Onkyo 5.1
Blu-ray: 297

I agree with you, but I think we would benefit more from an increase in memory speed vs. just memory size. The fact that the MSS only uses one stick of RAM, thus making it single channel @400MHz, is the killer here.

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EX490 w/ a Q9300 processor and stock RAM
Stock Seagate System Drive
(3) 1TB Samsung Spinpoint F3 7200rpm storage pool drives
Gen3 Debug Board (all connections)

I second what TechVet says. I've got the EX495 and with the stock 2GB the console and everything else was just too darn slow. So I upgraded to 4GB and see a huge improvement as well. Even the quickness of viewing the shared folders/files from networked computers seems to snap a little more quickly. The console is much more responsive. I only have 3 add-ins and I don't use Twonky. I use a PS3 to watch/listen to movies, music, photos but I honestly haven't tested that out yet. I was at approx 50% memory usage before and now I'm idling at approx 28%.

Typically with the faster memory there will be a higher latency. So it might actually run slower even though the memory speed is faster. I know when I checked out the memory modules and tests for speed and latency. The 1066 memory with a CAS 7 latency was benchmarked around the same as the 800 memory with a CAS 5 latency. I think the 800 memory may have actually been slightly faster. but that was at the beginning of the year when I researched what I was going to upgrade to.
I would have like to upgraded to a quad core CPU but the cost was too high at the time.
But I'm happy with my 2.8 Ghz Dual core and 800 CAS 5 4GB memory. The console is quick although it does take some time for it to finish booting with twenty eight drives in the system. I'm sure it would be quicker with the quad core for boot up.

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3TB MSS EX490(upgraded CPU-E6300(2.8Ghz dual core Pentium)),
4GB memory
57TB unRAID1a--49TB unRAID2--76TB unRAID3

All, I upgraded my EX495 to 4gb. I did not upgrade the processor yet. I will say that prior to the upgrade, I was dealing with a very sluggish console app. At times it would be ok, but its performance would be unreliable. I would rarely go above 65-70% on memory utilization. Now, I am usually around 45% or so. And this is now with running 15 add-ins. Previously, I would only run about 7 or 8 add-ins.

Prior to upgrade if I ran the HP Video Converter, the console would be almost unusable. So, I would usually disable the Converter if ever I had to perform any work via the console. Interacting with the console to disable the Converter was a painful process and slow process.

Now with the upgrade, I am running the HP Video Converter along with about 15 add-ins as noted above. The console is snappy with the memory utiliation rarely going above 45 to 50%.

With the HP Video Converter running, the CPUs seem to still be high. They're usually now in the 80 to 90% range. When, I disable the Converter, the CPUs drop way down to under 30%.

So far, so good with the new memory. Honestly, it was well worth the upgrade and about 5 minutes of effort. And, I highly recommend it if you are running the Converter and have a lot of add-ins as I do.

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regards, tim

Primary: HP ProLiant N40L w/ 22.25 TB
SansDigital TR8M+B eSATA
Backup: HP ProLiant N40L w/ 16.25 TB
SansDigital TR5M-B eSATA
Offsite: HP ProLiant N40L w/ 6.25 TB
SansDigital TR8U-B USB
Other: HP EX495 w/ 2.5 TB

I have the QX9650 installed, it will give 1333MHz FSB ...
So, does the 4 gb memory module at a speed of 1333MHz work?

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EX470 - upgraded Athlon 64 LE-1660, 2GB memory, 3 TB
EX490 - upgraded intel Core 2 Extreme Processor QX9650, 4Gt Kingston, 5 TB
DIY CoolerMaster Stacker - ASUS MS-7125, Processor AMD 3500+, 2GB Memory, 450GB - Dedicated to downloads

That's the question of the year right there. I have yet to see any proof that higher speed memory is being utilized with higher fsb processors.

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EX490 w/ a Q9300 processor and stock RAM
Stock Seagate System Drive
(3) 1TB Samsung Spinpoint F3 7200rpm storage pool drives
Gen3 Debug Board (all connections)

What memory are you using exactly?

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EX490 w/ a Q9300 processor and stock RAM
Stock Seagate System Drive
(3) 1TB Samsung Spinpoint F3 7200rpm storage pool drives
Gen3 Debug Board (all connections)

False analogy. RAM is nothing like hard drive space. "Unused" RAM is indeed used - for file caching. Since WHS is primarily a file server, having more memory for caching said files can hardly be a bad thing

All I know is with the Tivo connector doing it's thing, even with half of my memory showing as "unused", my remote console is often unresponsive. If I start up performance monitor and monitor page faults, they are going through the roof. Well, that will certainly kill performance since paging to disk is orders of magnitude slower than RAM - even slow RAM. It's no contest.

My 4 GB DIMM arrives tomorrow. It's going in before the 3GHz E6600 that arrived today, and I have no doubt it will, by itself, solve the unresponsive remote console issue since the extra memory should all but eliminate paging by Windows.

What people don't realize is the amount of available memory shown in task manager is only one part of the story - to really see whats going on, you need to monitor things like real page faults in the performance monitor.



Really? I have read just about every upgrade thread with great interest, and even with people who have VGA cables and can directly access the BIOS, I have yet to see anyone verify that they were able to take advantage of faster memory. Simply putting faster memory in your WHS won't make it go faster. Perhaps I missed one - there are quite a few upgrade threads

Biggest bang for the buck - for ANY computer - is to max out the RAM in it. I got a deal on 2GB DIMMs and for a little under $200 and I was able to go from six gigs of RAM to max out my 8 memory slots in my Mac pro for 16GB of RAM total and it made a night and day difference to programs like Aperture that love RAM. Civilaztion V runs much better under 64 bit Windows 7 on my Mac Pro with the extra RAM as well. I have a small business server that I administer for a non profit and it creeks by with just 4 GB of RAM - I'm anxiously awaiting SBS 2011 as it's 64 bit and can go beyond 4 GB. Indeed, it won't install unless you have 8GB of RAM! I guess MS finally got tired of people cheapening out on memory and built in a (long overdue, in my opinion) reasonable hard limit.

Memory is cheap! Max it out!

I see people do this all the time at work - they spend ridiculous amounts on a faster CPU's (that idles the majority of the time) when for half of the price difference between a base CPU and the upgrade, if they instead put that $$$ in maxing out RAM in their box they would see a bigger real world performance boost. I always recommend to our users to upgrade memory first, graphics if they need it second, SSD for hard drive and then dead last upgrading the CPU. Unless they are going to be doing video encoding, high end math or other explicitly CPU intensive work. That I am ready to start having my WHS re-encode my Tivo programs for my iPad is the only reason I have a new E6600 sitting here waiting to go in too

Here is the question on my mind. can the MSS 495 with stock CPU utilize DDR3? the reason I ask is cost. DD3 seems to be about 1/2 the price of some of the 4gb chips in DDR2. I was going to go with mushkin 4gb off newegg but they sold out right after i got the 495. What a shame.

I was thinking about this RAM for my EX490 upgrade. Any thoughts?

G.SKILL 4GB 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) Desktop Memory Model F2-6400CL6S-4GBMQ


http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... rue&Page=2

I purchased this memomory last week from the Canadian site, check out the feedback. A few people have added it to their MediaSmart Servers. http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.as ... 20-226-089

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HP MediaSmart EX495 E8600 3.2Ghz CPU, 4GB ram, 8TB storage including 3TB drives in pool. WHS with Active Directory, WDS, Media Center Master, Logitech server. Office 2010 server with client add-ins.
Microsoft MVP - Windows Home Server.