[NTLUG:Discuss] SunFire X2200 M2 memory strangeness

[Ralph Green]

Howdy,
  I had a strange experience with memory in a Sun server last night.
This is a donated server to a charity, and I am trying to see if I can
make it useful and a bit quieter.  I have some memory chips pulled
from other servers.  The memory in the Sun was 4 1 GB sticks(DDR2, ECC
registered, PC2-5300 speed).  My extra sticks are bigger(2GB) and
slower(DDR2, ECC registered, PC2-3200 speed).  I tried putting 4 of
the 2 GB in each bank, but it would not boot at all.  I ended up
putting the 4 1 GB sticks in memory bank 0 and 6 2GB sticks in memory
bank 1 and it seems to run fine.  This leads to a couple of questions
and I wonder if people have seen similar behavior in other computers.
 1. Why would the bigger sticks only work in memory bank 1?
 2. Is there any problem running 3 times as much memory in one bank?
 I am planning on using this as a database server and I am looking
forward to being able to have 16 GB of RAM and 4 pretty good CPUs to
test with.  The server will go back to the charity, but I get to play
with it a while.
Thanks,
Ralph