IBM SCSI Adaptor Kit

Advantages: A bargain. Easy to install and used. Good entry level SCSI controller.
Disadvantages: No support for higher data rates.

...large images quickly. Other than a high rate of data, transfer SCSI has two main advantages. The most important is the number of devices you can connect. Even budget cards like the AVA – 2904 can mange a total of seven SCSI devices be they internal or external. The second advantage is that SCSI devices are more reliable. It is true that USB lets you add a lot of devices as well but SCSI still gives better reliability and performance and there are probably still more SCSI devices than USB. Reliability is irrelevant if you are buying new equipment as most pc hardware is good these days, but if you are on a budget (or even just enjoy tinkering) you can buy old SCSI devices and be reasonably confident they will still perform well. Since SCSI has been around a long time there is a lot of old kit available. For example if you are short... Read review

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Advantages: power,redundancy,expandibility
Disadvantages: Price

...The configuration I use is : 2x Xeon 3.6GHz/800MHz (1MB L2 Cache), 4x 512MB ECC 133MHz SDRAM,48x-20x IDE CD-ROM drive, Dual Broadcom 5721 Gigabit Ethernet, ATI Radeon 7000M, IBM 5U x 24in Tower To Rack Conversion Kit ,5x146.4 GB 10 000 rpm Ultra320 80-pin hard drive,Serveraid 7k SCSI raid card, Remote supervisor Adapter II card. Operating System provided by IBM as well ( part number 90P0221) Microsoft Windows 2003 Server, Standard Edition. Packaging and manuals: Server is very well packaged,rack conversion comes with explanation for conversion, but the whole conversion is not intuitive at all.Picture provided in installation instructions not very helpful. Bit and pieces included in the packages ,as keyboard and mouse for Server.IBM Director and Serveraid manager CD, plus OS CDin the box, OS pre-installed. Set-Up. Set up is quite easy... Read review

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Advantages: good build quality - rarely break down - It's an IBM!
Disadvantages: support website can sometimes be awkward to navigate.

...I must have built / overseen the build on about 100 of these over the last five years starting with the X220 up to this current 226 and I have had very little to complain about. You can also buy a rack conversion kit in order to rack mount it With the addition of a pair of 73GB 10K hot swap scsi drives (about £250-300 for the pair) configured to use the on board HostRaid the 226 is an ideal entry level or terminal server. I have often installed it (with the addition of a 6i RAID controller to give a RAID5 config) with MS SBS2003 standard as the main server for a small business of up to 25 users. It handles file & print and exchange without any real fuss although I would recommend plenty of RAM if you are going to do this as Exchange can be quite memory hungry The on-board HostRaid card comes disabled so you have to go in and set... Read review

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