I built this PC in June 2020, and I haven’t touched its hardware components since. I only know the date because it’s printed on one of the sticks I pulled out that night, and seeing it stopped me for a second. Peak pandemic, me putting a machine together on the dining table. Six years later it was still running everything I’d thrown at it, which is exactly why I never touched it.
The reason I finally had to was Wazuh.
My Proxmox host, lab0, was sitting on 32GB of RAM. I restarted it fresh, and it climbed right back to 63% memory utilization; on a normal day when I’m not touching anything, it drifts up to 70% or 71%. Almost all of that is one node. Wazuh was pulling around 18GB immediately after boot and creeping toward 30GB the longer it stayed up.
That’s what finally pushed me. It wasn’t that anything was broken; it’s that nothing new could ever get built. Every time I thought about spinning up another VM for a project, the math said no before I even got to the fun part. So I had to upgrade the memory.
Two G.SKILL Ripjaws V DDR4 sticks, 16GB each, to take the host from 32GB to 64GB. $239, which stung a little. If you’ve priced memory recently, you already know why: AI demand has RAM in a strange place right now, and DDR4 didn’t get a pass. Not an outrageous number for 32GB, but definitely a premium over what I paid for the original build.
Before I pulled power on anything, I did one small thing that I’d recommend to anybody about to do the same job. I went into the Wazuh VM options in Proxmox and turned on start at boot. It takes thirty seconds, and it means that when the host comes back, your important VMs come back with it. Then I shut the node down cleanly, powered off the machine, and unplugged it.
Where it started going wrong
Two open DIMM slots, two new sticks. I had this pegged as a fifteen-minute job.
The first one went in fine. Lined up the notch, pressed down, heard the click, felt pretty good about myself. I flipped the lever on the second slot, slid that stick in, and it felt locked, so I closed everything up, plugged the machine back in, and hit power.
Yellow light.
I gave it time, because I didn’t expect it to post instantly, and I kept refreshing the Proxmox page like that would help. It stayed yellow. Then, on a later attempt, it went red, and red is what actually worried me. So I looked both up, and it turns out the board had been telling me exactly what was wrong the entire time.
Solid yellow or amber on the DRAM light means memory failed the power-on self-test. Red means the system can’t detect a component at all.
Fine. Something’s loose. I powered down, opened it back up, and started reseating.
The thing I didn’t know about DDR4
This is where I burned most of the evening, and where the actual lesson lies.
I pulled the sticks and pushed them back in, and nothing changed. Did it again; still yellow. I was being careful, because these things are expensive and they feel fragile, and I kept thinking I was going to crack something. At one point I caught myself wondering if I was the problem, doing this on my office floor, in bad light, wearing jewelry, not grounded, which is a pretty complete list of what you’re not supposed to do.
I was the problem, just not in the way I assumed.
