Over the years I have bought and installed more memory upgrades than I would care to mention. First stop has been either Kingston or Crucial. No préférence, usually price or availability of the product.
But just read the price has rocketted by great amount due to all the demands of data centres and AI. So one has decided to stop direct sales
Just left with Kingston, unless you know or use another ?
But also have to admit, more and more computers coming in for repair have the memory direct on the motherboard board, or the case is so difficult to open they are no longer designed to open. But worse still they continue to sell new laptops for windows 11 (installed) with 4gb memory which is not wonderful.
Hynix, Samsung, G Skill if you want “better sounding” brands (they probably spent more on marketing).
I used “no name” CSX or Teamgroup modules, and had no problem with them.
I seem to remember “Kingmax”, but I’m not sure this brand exists today.
I saw that Crucial story too and I have bought direct from them more than once. You can still get Crucial from Best Buy or Amazon and probably other places. In the past the pricing was not much, if any, different buying direct versus Best Buy. I don’t think Crucial wanted to alienate their large customers like Best Buy by undercutting prices.
Note - these shortages and price hikes should only affect DDR5…
I’m just about to buy 16 GB of DDR3 and 1 TB SSD (from Bezos Corp) for a box I’m going to use to run Jellyfin - it’s a media streaming platform/server, but it’s fully open source, unlike Plex…
I’ve got a Quad Core i5 sitting on my floor next to me desk - hasn’t been powered up since my youngest daughter switched completely to Apple (iPad, iPhone, Mac Mini and MacBook) - so probably 3 years?
Going to whack in a spare NVidia (GTX1650 super with 4 GB) and keep it plugged direct into my switch and index my movie and TV show collection on my NAS over 1 Gbit… Probably install Ubuntu 24.04 on it - still undecided about whether desktop, or headless… Probably easiest to install desktop - I can always disable GDM from running when I’m ready for it to go “headless”… That will be the easiest way to get NVidia proprietary drivers working - too much stuffing around in Debian…
I was using Plex Media Server on a Pi4 - but - it was just too damn slow to find and “transcode” new content on my NAS… I don’t think Pi4 (or even Pi5) is quite ready yet to run heavy compute stuff…
What I like about having my own streaming server - anyone in the house can access it - and I can watch stuff on my laptop or MacBook, or iPad or Android phone - and resume where I left off when I move to another device (e.g. my desktop machine) - just like having my own self-hosted Netflix…
Hmmm… I already have an idle i7 (not sure what gen) with 16 GB RAM - and I have spare 256 GB SATA SSD’s… Probably cheaper to buy a low profile intel arc a310 - as the JellyFin recommendations seem to prefer that over NVidia GPU… That way I don’t need to buy RAM or SSD… and spend that money on an Intel Arc GPU instead…
Same here - my most grunty system is still on DDR4…
And all the Apple shite I (and my family) have is all soldered on - maybe DDR5 - but no upgrade path…
That Intel ARC A310 GPU has 4 GB of DDR6!
I should get one ASAP…
I’d love ECC… But the only system I have using (or that can use ECC) is my HP N40L microserver running TrueNAS 13… I upgraded from 8 GB non-ECC to 16 GB ECC and - no issues…
I really need to get a spare Power Supply for this system…