Back in the day it was clear what a server motherboard was: it has two CPU sockets, onboard SCSI, onboard NIC, 64 bit PCI (later PCI-X) slots, extended ATX form factor and lots of fan headers.  You needed a server motherboard to take advantage of those high bandwidth PCI slots, because you couldn’t get them on a regular motherboard.  Same with the second CPU: for serious computing you needed two cores, and that meant two physical processors.
That started to change, but very slowly with the concept of a workstation motherboard that …

Lets take a look at CPU choices in the SME server environment. My big reason for getting into server systems was to have two processors in the same system. Today a server can be efficiently handled with one CPU socket and a dual or quad core processor.
Backtracking just a little, Intel and AMD create unique server class processors for motherboards with two or more CPU sockets: Intel Xeon 5000 series and AMD Opteron 2000 series. These may share common architecture with desktop chips but they will only …

The term “server” has greatly evolved over the course of computing. When I started this site in 1999 servers were dual processor systems with SCSI hardware, RAID and a very solid build. Since I’m a do it yourself kind of computer user I’ve been building my own servers for more than a decade, but lately I’ve wondered if there is any room left for “white box” or component built servers.
Poking around that crazy “interweb” shopping for SME (small to medium enterprise, just in case) servers led me to …

It’s been a few weeks since my last eWeakly, simply for the fact that I haven’t done anything computer related of interest.
Last week Microsoft released the Windows Home Server Community Technology Preview (CTP).  This put a lot more fit and finish to the product.  I used the upgrade option to upgrade my existing WHS beta 2 installation.  Things went well, but I was still getting a failing service and couldn’t install the client software.  I had hoped the upgrade would resolve these two issues.
Around the same time I realized my …

The great server upgrade took place this weekend, or to be more accurate is still taking place.  I had a lot of spare parts at home and had already built the server.  As I started to remove files from the existing server one of the three Samsung 160 GB SATA drives failed and my RAID 5 array started limping in degraded mode.
But that’s alright, as I had a spare server already set up.  A Tyan 2882-D motherboard, two Opteron 246 CPUs, four 1 GB PC2100 DDR ECC RAM, 3ware Escalade 9550SX …

It seems my friends that the CRT monitor is in fact dead.  For my day job we have many locations and buy only CRT monitors.  Everything has gone swimmingly until last week when our vendor said they couldn’t get CRT monitors for us anymore.
Before we go further let me say there’s a corporate policy to only use CRT monitors at the moment, power and space savings be damned!  I found this whole “no more CRTs” situation incredible: I still had a few running at home, although in lowly support positions …

My APC UPS problems continue ( see last week for more details ) with random reboots.  I don’t believe the battery is working at all right now.  I have a brand new APC Smart UPS 1500 Rackmount in the garage, but I’ve been hoping to sell it instead of absorbing it into the household tech.  Guess it will be pressed into service.
I posted a review of the Promise SATA300 TX4 but needed a high quality pic.  There’s a tiny picture on the Promise website but when you click “Enlarge Image” …

I was repurposing an older Xeon workstation and needed SATA ports which this particular system lacked (see eBabble Weakly for more info). There is a distinct lack of SATA rev 1.0a (with spec extensions)controller cards available, i.e. 300 MB/s connection, native command queuing, etc. Everywhere I looked I found derivatives of a Silicon Image SATA rev 1.0 controller with four ports on a 32 bit 66 MHz PCI connection. This would give a maximum throughput of 266 MB per second, which is all this motherboard would support …

At home I run a Small Business Server ( SBS ) 2003 domain and connect my PCs to it.  I’m in a corporate setting and am used to a Microsoft domain setup, so when SBS 4.5 was released many years ago I jumped onboard and have kept upgrading to the latest and greatest.  In a nutshell SBS combines Windows Server, Exchange and remote access in one nice package and adds a ton of wizards to guide you through getting set up and maintaining your environment.  With SBS 2003 the wizards …

I have that wonderful WD Passport drive and use it for shuffling files between work and home.  I was copying a directory over and it was telling me the destination was full and couldn’t copy a 6 GB ISO image.  Not exactly sure what the issue was but guessed it was related to the file system when I saw the WD Passport used FAT32.  I know why WD would use FAT32 since it would work well with most versions of Windows, Linux and OS X, but I like NTFS since …

Tape backup; boring, uneventful, necessary.  Nothing splashy or exciting about the oldest backup medium.  Why is it still in use? Tape is reliable, relatively inexpensive and gets the job done.  Most businesses running a server use a tape drive for daily backup of important documents, system files, what have you. Still don’t see the need?  Say your business works on important documents every day, making daily changes. Something goes wrong and you need a copy of a file from six days ago.  Since you overwrite the file on the server …

Power protection is something that comes up, oh, never.  You have the PC, monitor, printer and whatever else plugged into a $10 power bar you bought at Radio Shack.  This is bad.  Regardless of what’s passed before as acceptable, every computer needs to be attached to a surge protector or better.  How do you know a good product? Two things: they offer insurance from $2500 and up against your computer frying, and their a name brand like APC or Tripp Lite.  Don’t forget to get one that protects your phone line …

Let’s take a look at the MicroStar MS-6103 Socket 8 motherboard. I know the first thing you’re going to say; why bother with a motherboard from 1995? My main reason is the number of search hits I get looking for information on this model, plus the emails requesting information. I’ve been using this board with two Pentium Pro 180 MHz processors and 128 MB of RAM in a variety of situations and have made a few discoveries that may help those who are still using it.
The board …

Motherboards are a difficult item to review, for good reason. After listing the features from the manufacturer’s web site, what do you discuss? Installation is pretty well the same for all boards, depending on form factor. Benchmarks are difficult unless you have a lot of different boards to test. This is best left to dedicated motherboard sites like Anandtech, which does and excellent job and covers most of the boards on the market. What’s left are the idiosyncrasies and odd bits that make an impression. …

I’ve talked a lot about ATA RAID these last few months, but have left out an important aspect of fault tolerance. To accompany a hot swappable RAID card like the SuperTrak100, you need removable drive cages or chassis. Promise has seen this need and released the SuperSwap Chassis, a lockable IDE removable drive housing.
The SuperSwap comes in a fancy box with the following inside; a plastic drive housing, a steel drive cage, mounting screws and a small manual. The drive housing is screwed into a 5.25” drive bay …

When one thinks of ATA RAID, the first name that comes to mind is Promise. The first company to mass market a controller for IDE drives continues the FastTrak line from the original to the 66 and 100 models, each accommodating a new generation of ATA specs.
Looking at the features offered, very little has changed between the three models other than the ATA spec supported. All three FastTrak’s support four disks in the following configurations: RAID 0, RAID 1 and RAID 0+1. The FastTrak100 supports JBOD ( just a bunch …

The second card in our ATA RAID project is the Promise SuperTrak100.  Promise has had a long standing relationship with ATA RAID in the form of their FastTrak line, which we’ll look at next week.  With the SuperTrak line Promise adds RAID 3 and 5 along with RAID 0, 1 and 0+1.  Two models are available; the SuperTrak66 which is an ATA66 card with a four drive capacity, and the SuperTrak100 which boasts ATA100 connectivity with a six drive capacity. Let’s examine the card from box to benchmarks.
Upon opening the Promise …

After spending far too many nights benchmarking, let’s take a look at the first of three ATA RAID adapters. The Adaptec AAA-UDMA was the first RAID 5 adapter designed for ATA hard drives. RAID had been the domain of SCSI hard drives until 1995 when Promise released the FastTrak, a RAID 0, 1 and 0+1 ATA33 adapter. Since then quite a few companies, Promise, Highpoint and AMI to name a few, have released ATA RAID adapters in the same vein. It took a leader in SCSI to release the first …

Escalade® 8506 Series

Supports up to 12 drives with a single PCI card enabling up to 3terabytes of storage (dependent on drive capacity , 2TB per array maximum)
Supports ATA / 133 / 100 drives with a Parallel-to-Serial Drive Converter
StorSwitch point-to-point non-blocking architecture
PCI 2.2 compliant 64-bit / 66MHz bus master
RAID 0, 1, 10, 5 and JBOD support (2-port cotrollers support RAID 0,1 and JBOD)
On-board processor to provide true hardware-based RAID
Bootable array support for greater fault tolerance
BIOS set up utility and 3ware Disk Manager (3DM) web-based management software
Hot-swap and hot-spare capability
Windows® and Linux® …

The world of ATA RAID is a small one. When I first became interested there were two players: Promise and Highpoint. Slowly I began to hear of 3ware, a company that produced great products, but at a high price. At that time RAID 0 and 1 were about it, and then Promise released the SuperTrak100 and Adaptec released the AAA-UDMA, both touting RAID 5. At that time 3ware released a BIOS and driver update for their Escalade 6000 series that added RAID 5. Of course there was no onboard RAM …