Generic parts for Catalyst 6500

[emilyharris]

I'm curious whether anyone has purchased generic DRAM and / or generic PCMCIA flash cards for the Catalyst 6500 series and whether or not you've been successful with it. I tend towards always buying Cisco parts, mostly in fear of incompatibility. But the price differences are gargantuan.

Does anyone have any success stories in using generic memory and / or PCMCIA flash? Or any disaster stories for that matter??

Thank you!

EMILY

[nsysblh]

We bought a bunch of generic 512M CF cards for everything we have. I am running them in about 10 digi-cm console switches, a Cisco 4006, 4507r, and 6509e

Because 12.2(18)SXE1 is > 64M, I am booting the 6509e off the CF card.

We had a failure on one of the SupIVs in the 4507r, and I used the CF card to copy the firmware and bootrom back onto the replacement.

I've had no actual problems. squeeze takes forever on the 4xxx machines, so it is easier to re-format and re-copy rather than delete and squeeze.

512M is enough space to not have to delete anything anyway. I keep disk0 with the latest image and disk1 has the current image and fallback images.

I've never even considered generic DRAM...if there is a problem, you can't just pop the DRAM out to see if it was causing a problem...you can just pop out the CF card if needed.

[wkumari]

Yup, I have used generic RAM in 7200s, 7500s and 6500s (Sup2, MSFC2, Sup720) without any issues. I have had long chats with my SE and the warantee repercussions are not entirely clear (but from what I have been able to figure out, Cisco is still responsible for warantee on the card, just not on the RAM (duh!)), so I usually try and put hte poriginal cisoc RAM back in before RMAing cards. On at least 4 seperate occasions I have RMAed a SUP with generic RAM on it and have never had a problem (other than once not getting my larger RAM back). The cost difference more than makes up for losing a 512Mb sim once in a while!

Warren Kumari