You’re wondering how your new, huge, full-speed 6200 MHz Xserve is suddenly struggling to work. Maybe you’re wondering why all the storage drives are filling up with huge files, or why your Windows is just taking forever.
You’re not the only one, and while there are a number of potential issues, it’s usually pretty easy to find the problem in the BIOS or the System Recovery Drive. The Question Why is my computer using so much Ram? is quite common.
A bit of history first, before we begin.
Most Xservers come with three SATA drives, though there are sometimes four. The two lower SATA drives are considered “baseline” or “small,” and they can be upgraded with small speed boosts via the caddie cables. The two top drives, however, are slightly slower (128MB per second instead of 256MB per second) and are the most useful for backups. They should also be the slowest SATA drives on your system.
Why is my computer using so much Ram?
The Core 2 processors came with an operating system (usually Windows XP Home) that was limited to a single 4 GB, 8 GB, or 16 GB SSD. Thanks to SSD drives coming down in price over the last few years, that’s enough space for most applications.
The OS will (hopefully) never have a problem filling up the OS drive, and the Core 2 can keep its speed while the OS is being loaded.
With all that in mind, here’s what you can look for when you start having problems with your drives.
SATA and MB: Strictly speaking, we’re not talking about SSDs here. These are a part of a SATA controller and can be used for some storage, but they aren’t actually SSDs. The SSDs mentioned at the beginning of this article are SSDs.
Overvoltage: Overvoltage protection limits the voltage to the SATA connector, so if you overload it, it will simply give up. The SSD controller in the Intel XS-6200, like most SSDs, can handle a little over 300 volts. If it gets past that, you’ll have to reformat it.
Probe: The bad news is that you don’t know what’s going on with the SSD until you’ve rebooted and run disk management. The good news is that the SSD controller has a robust “zero-wait” protection system that will bring it down to a safe voltage level before the OS can bring you all the way back up. By default, it will bring it to a voltage level of at least 70 volts, and you’ll be ready to go in a few minutes.
But your Xserve is at least six years old, if not ten. To get a real answer, you’ll need to dump the System Recovery Drive (DRD).
Why is my computer using so much Ram?
The Xserve DRD is based on a Synergy system, and boots off of the Network Boot Device (NBD) slot on the motherboard. It has a controller that is easily configurable and allowed it to boot most OSes. The NBD chip is plugged into one of the storage drives and turns on once the DRD boots the operating system. The DRD also acts as a boot controller.
It will set up the SSD controller for boot from an external boot drive (USB 2.0 is standard), but it doesn’t actually turn the disk drives on or off. The DRD actually uses the onboard SATA interface to boot from and then routes the SATA connection to the two SSDs.
It won’t let you set the SSDs to a specific speed, but you can reconfigure the drives to be one or two CPUs faster. In other words, if you can’t shut down or upgrade the drives yourself, the DRD lets you do it. I try to explain to you Why is my computer using so much Ram?
Of course, as long as you have a full-speed SSD, an Xserve DRD won’t be much help. That’s where the next section comes in.
While reading through the documentation, I found a pretty clear-cut way to make the DRD active when it should have been. It’s only a few minutes of work and involves a pretty basic setup. It’s also a guaranteed fix for most of the problems you’re having.
First, you need to create a bootable CD that includes Linux. The Raspbian Live CD is perfect. Next, use a Linux utility (for example, I use GParted) to install Linux (LILO is a good choice) and format the NBD chip. That way, it’s ready to handle an SSD boot. The NBD is actually part of the hard drive controller, and the OS will attempt to write to it.
The NBD will likely write to the “bootable” drive in parallel with a system partition and a boot disk. The bootable drive will not boot until all of these steps have been run, but it’s already in the system, so you can run the first part of the setup right away.
The first command will start up the NBD chip, but it will also attach it to a second drive, the DRD. This second drive will act as a part of the boot environment, and you can access it by typing:
scap . / device / ddr2 / start / 1
First, stop the NBD chip in the GParted program, and then run the following command:
scap . / device / ddr2 / stop
Now the NBD chip is only connected to the DRD by a single cable. You can run scap again to kill the NBD chip, and then start the DRD by typing:
scap . / device / ddr2 / start
Now you should see a prompt to run the driver and get the system up and running.
If all goes well, the boot process will be complete and the DRD will be active. It will charge the SATA connection to the SSDs (assuming they still have charged). Now, Why is my computer using so much Ram? is not difficult for you.
Hope You know the answer Now: Why is my computer using so much Ram?
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