Sorting your ram

[NeXT]

I'm sure I'm not in the same boat here.
I knew years ago that as time passed, older types of ram would become more and more scarce so whenever I saw stuff pass through the landfill I grabbed it and tossed it in a box to later sort it into antistatic bags in relation to the type of SIMM.
I'm now curreantly standing at this:

I have a little bit of everything...most of it 72-pin SIMMS...however finding what I need is a royal pain. 90% of it is not properly marked so if I need something specific I gotta try each stick one by one until I find it. It would be a hell of a lot niver if I could have a piece of tape on each stick that told me the type, speed, and size. I could do this by googling the part numbers on the sticks or chips but that will also throw a lot of false results and chinese datasheets and I don't ahve forever to sort through it all for each stick. Is there anything out there I can use to rather quickly look up the info I need for each stick?

 

[digger]

That's quite a collection you have there.

And clever thinking about salvaging them where you can, too.

I notice you even have a few of those 30-pin to 72-pin SIMM convertors there on the lower left. I remember buying one of those convertors back in the day, hoping to save the expensive costs of upgrading my memory along with a Pentium motherboard that I had upgraded to. Unfortunately, it didn't work. Were they always so problematic, or did I just get a dud when I bought it at the computer fair?

 

[NeXT]

Pentium boards were really icky about the speed of the ram, especially with those adapters I found. I got better results when I filled one with 4mb SIMMS and put into a late version 486 board.

 

[barythrin]

lol, maybe it's time for us to collect SIMM and DIMM testers (maybe they're not all gone yet) although honestly I've had iffy luck with them detecting a bad chip (though I suppose it could have been a bad socket). The only way I found to semi-reliably test them (and also the only way I found to really note their size if it's not written on them) was to use an old system and plug 4 in, run a memtest then jot it down myself. Really painful project and process. I have a similar problem at home but I rarely upgrade systems that use that memory so I haven't had to sort it much more than a cardboard box.

 

[NeXT]

BRILLIANT!!

That was exactly what I was looking for. I can load it up on my laptop and just lookup the chips and do the math.

 

[Unknown_K]

I have bags of RAM. It is hard to sort them all out. SIMM/DIMM testers would be good if they not only let you know if the RAM works, but if it is parity,ecc, buffered etc.

Years ago I would bid on the testers on ebay, but they seemed to go for more then I wanted to spend at the time plus you needed modules for each type.

 

[per]

Count the legs of the RAM chips.

4 sets of 5 legs per chip means that each chip is 4x1Mbit. This means that two of therse chips makes up 1MByte, and 8 of them makes up 4MBytes. 16 of them of course makes up 8MBytes.

4 sets of 6 legs equals 4x4Mbit per chip. Two of those are 4MBytes, 8 of them are then 16MBytes and 16 of them are 32MBytes.

If there is a third, ninth or eigtheenth chip, then it has pairity.

If the chip doesn't have four sets of pins as noted above, it should be googled or looked up on the link in the post above. About the speed, most manufactures writes it as a number in the end of the chip ID number. It's usually 60, 70, 6, or 7. You have to examine the numbering of the different companies in the link above to see if it's EDO or FastPage.

---

Since most chips are already labeled if they are EDO or not, it should be rather quick if you follow therse guidelines as you don't need to look up anything. You will eventually find some patterns in the numbering, and you'll see that some numbers (100 and 400, perhaps 105 and 405 for EDO chips) are repeating in the chip ID numbers of RAM chips of the same kind.

*Addition*
Also note that most 1x1MBit chips has four pair of five pins, just like the 4x1MBit chips. However, 1x1MBit chips almost only appears on 30-pin SIMM's, and are allways present in amounts of 8 or 9. 4x1Mbit chips usually only appears in pairs, (perhaps together with an 1x1Mbit chip for pairity) on 30-pin SIMM's. When in doubt, look them up on the website mentioned above or google the ID.