Thanks to all who responded. I didn't have a comparison system, but I was able to isolate the problem down to a single DDR2 stick (via trial and error). annoyingly, even once I'd which stick was to blame, even when I only used that stick, memtest86+ did not find any errors on it.
Cumulatively, I had left memtest86 running for over 40 hours, and it completed 24 full runs over that period. (memtest86+ 2.11). Still, I don't have way of putting load onto the system to guarantee a failure, so sometimes the system would be stable for 24 hours, and on other occasions (worst case!) 24 seconds. The best way of loading up the machine I found was to run "zpool scrub" at the same time as running a couple of VMs (in VirtualBox of course), with a couple of diagnostic tools running inside. And it was interesting that Windows7 didn't crash at all (and continued running two benchmarks simultaneously over 24 hours). I guess maybe a lots of Windows 7 is bloat, and the affected physical memory location happened to coincide with data, not program stack, or that Windows doens't actively check NTFS filesystem checksums like ZFS does. Anyway - problem found. Chris > > Already mentioned but just to be sure.. a barebone setup (board, CPU, 1 > stick of RAM, graphics) is best - I don't know if your board has onboard > video but you might like to try and revert to that for testing, OTOH, > disable all south bridge functions (nic, sound, etc) - There's often a 'load > failsafe defaults' option in the BIOS setup. > > As mentioned, check the cable. Actually don't bother checking it, just > replace it. > > What are your temps like (CPU/case)? Is cooling adequate? Does the ambient > environment seem to effect the frequency of crashes? Adequate power supply > to the components is also important - are you using a nice weighty high > wattage PSU? You mention high IO load raises the issue - maybe there isn't > enough juice? > > Might like to check a non Solaris based test suite as well as the Seagate > Seatools suite (will pass though I'm sure), ultimate boot cd (UBCD) has a > few other disk testing utilities included. > > Good luck, > > Peter Davidoff. -- Regards, Chris
