[ale] 2 questions memory related

[Scott Castaline]

1. Just had 1 stick 2GB of RAM go bad. I had originally bought as part of a
set of 4 sticks for a total of 8GB. My question is how critical is it to buy
in matched sets? Couldn't I buy just a replacement for that stick? I don't
overclock so I don't push them so I can't see where I have to have
handpicked memory. I would plan on getting the same exact mfg part on a
single stick basis.Am I wrong tinking this way?

2. I am currently running dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sde on a new 2TB drive.
I was logged into my GUI desktop (KDE) and after several hours my desktop
started disintegrating and window apps were becoming unrecognisable, but I
was able to close ot most of them. I switched over to one of the text VTs
and top was reporting that out of 4GB of RAM I only had less than 500MB
available and I was starting to use swap. I've done this in the past with
only 4GB of RAM on different hardware and earlier version of Fedora, without
any problems like this. I'm not doing anything that different than in the
past. My question is, what command(s) would tell me what is actually hogging
all of the RAM? I don't want to kill the process as I'm anticipating it
aking about 4 days to complete. At least on a 2 core AMD it toke about 44
hours for 1TB, I'm not sure how much quicker a 4 core processor will do
this. I was also running 800MHz RAM then, now I'm running 1333MHz RAM of
course I realize that that is not the real speed of the bus clock.

TIA
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