I heard that Smart Modular is listed as one of the approved vendors that's used in shipping Cisco products. That's my 2 cents. Sincerely, Dennis J. Hartmann White Pine Consulting Global Knowledge-MPLS Course Director http://www.globalknowledge.com/training/course.asp?PageID=9&courseid=1571 dennisjhartmann@hotmail.com AOL IM: dennisjhartmann -----Original Message----- From: owner-nanog@merit.edu [mailto:owner-nanog@merit.edu]On Behalf Of Barton F Bruce Sent: Sunday, September 23, 2001 5:24 AM To: nanog@merit.edu Subject: Re: Cisco Memory Types We have found Kingston to be quite expensive and not very useful describing exactly what the module is, but has extensive cisco listings. Crucial (which *IS* Micron itself's retail group) is spotty in cisco product coverage in their cross reference listing. They list many even obscure cisco items but when clicked you may get a "sorry we don't have that one" message - perhaps they are seeing how much interest there is. SimpleTech is pretty good. BUT, if using SimpleTech, do check each and every one of their resellers as the price is often 2:1 or even *OVER* 3:1 between dealers. Luckily they list the dealers own catalog # and you just click each for P&A. You can tank up your NPE-300 to 256meg for under $80 with SimpleTech for example at the lowest price dealer ($37.99 per 128 meg DIMM) - and that still seems HIGH with most 256 running well below $40. They claim that NPE-300 memory is PC100 ECC, and that VIP 4-80 is PC100 REGISTERED ECC. No wonder what we initially tried from random PC stock failed. http://www.simpletech.com/upgNav/index.php?ProfileID=2&screen=model&type =memory&manufact=Cisco So trying Crucial: http://www.crucial.com/store/listparts.asp?model=7200+Series+Router+NPE- 300&x=9&y=12 you find that each 128 meg direct from them is $20.69 and shipping is FREE. But they list it as SDRAM PC133 ECC CL=3. For pennies more in their generic memory listings, you can find the same but with CL=2. I wonder if cisco would take advantage of that automatically? The other interesting substitution is for all the newer processors that can boot from FLASHDISK (disk0:, disk1:) as opposed to only the old "Linear FLASH" (slot0: slot1: that you had to reformat or delete and squeeze to make space), one should be using the disk flavor as they are very user friendly. Just don't buy from cisco. The ones cisco ships are vanilla SanDisk PCMCIA cards and are readily available in many other and larger sizes than cisco sells. Due to the popularity of various camera formats, the compact flash units are far less $s than the PCMCIA format but if you add the $9-14 PCMCIA to Compact Flash adapter, your cisco will take compact flash - and you can buy it all in any city at even crazy hours in an emergency. Not sure how long compact flash cards will last in open COLO with camera users wandering around, but that is another issue. There was a time when the smart thing to do for 25xx routers was to compress the images (.Z or -mz style) to let existing 4 meg flash SIMMs still work with slightly over 4 meg images AND to force running from DRAM so flash would remain (read/write) so uploads could be done running normally without FLH. Now the images needed for new features have bulged to where you must be running with 8 meg flash SIMMs and preferably 2 of them. If your pet image fits in 8 meg, even though its SIMM is (read-only) the other SIMM will remain (read/write) - again no FLH needed for upgrades. Partition flash 1 8 with 2 4 meg SIMMs sucks because you are back with FLH. Does anyone have a consistent source for 80 pin 8 meg flash SIMMs AT REALLY GOOD PRICES, and preferably with Intel chips as there are still a LOT of 2500s out there with OLD boot PLCC chips that don't recognize AMD flash. The Sharp chips are OK as they ID as and behave like Intel ones. I keep finding 8 meg at around $60, but not where you can go next time and expect to find more.