That's Bad

I thought maybe the thunderstorm had caused the hard drive to fail. However, it's now obvious that something else had gone wrong.

Fortunately I have spare sticks of DDR all over the place and was able to replace the bad piece/pair with a working good pair.

Quick experiments with Memtest86 also showed that a) the memory access still gets slower as the amount of memory increases (from about 1900 mb/sec @ 1 gig to 1700 mb/sec at 3 gigs, and b) memory access gets way worse with unmatched dimms, which causes the machine to leave dual channel mode and go to single channel (1900 mb/sec to 900 mb/sec).

I should probably be worried that SMART reports that the boot disk has over 5 years of continuous uptime. I probably won't be worried until it's dead and everything that I rely on the server doing for me stops too.