I have a NAS with a 3rd gen i7 and 8 GB (2x 4GB DDR3 1600 MHz) of non-ECC RAM which has a RAID 5 mdadm array. I don’t have any memory issues but I could as I add more services. I have two other 4 GB sticks 1333 MHz DDR3 which I have no other use for. I don’t care about the minor speed decrease. I know mixing is generally a bad idea.
But, all of the posts I’ve seen about this are in regard to playing games or in production environments with server-grade hardware (ECC RAM, maybe hardware RAID). Not in a consumer hardware-focused homelab-type environment
What do you all think? Has anyone else done something similar? Am I asking for trouble here?
Not a professional in this field by any means, so other people with more knowledge could have a better or (right) answer.
I’ve turned my old gaming system with non-ecc RAM into Proxmox server that’s running a Minecraft server, NAS, pi-hole and a couple other things. It originally had 16gb of RAM, and I bumped it up to 32gb with sticks running similar speeds. I think that’s the biggest thing here. You will likely be fine running mixed speeds, but just know that your system will be as fast as the slowest component. Even though you have sticks at higher speeds, you’ll be limited to the lower speeds. Since you don’t care about speeds that much, I’d say you’re fine. I could be wrong though, so hopefully someone else with more knowledge will chime in.