IBM Storage controller (RAID)

Advantages: The world seems to have good drives
Disadvantages: I had TWO dodgy ones

...I just thought I'd add that these drives should be avoided, IBM is being sued as these drives are consistantly bad. See www.theregister.co.uk for more. Here’s a joke for you, what comes in pairs, is square, black, round and makes strange clicking noises. My rather non-functional pair of 30 gigabyte (1024 megabytes if you’re buying, 1000 megabytes if you’re selling) IBM hard drives which are, or rather were, in a RAID array (RAID 101 – join two disks together and get twice the speed and capacity, although that’s a very simple definition) that in itself wasn’t working to well (But that’s another story). But I’m getting ahead of myself, I first got these drives last November (Indeed it was the first thing my writing bought for me), when life became to cramped on my 17gig Fujitsu drive that came with my computer. A brief bit... Read review

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Advantages: Very versatile mid range server
Disadvantages: support web site can be awkward to navigate

...and and 4 143GB 15K disks for the data configured as RAID5 (with the addition of an IBM 7k RAID card) with a hot spare. This gives a 73GB OS partition which should be ample for most SBS installations including the exchange store. I tend to find that most SBS base builds come to about 20GB once everything is installed. This leaves just over 50GB for the exchange store and page file. The data partition would then be about 250GB which should be ample for most SMB's. Inside the server is just as good and as this model has the dual power supplies installed I would imagine it also comes with 6 cooling fans. If you see a cheaper price for the same model make sure it has dual supplies. There is a thick perspex cover directing air from 2 of the fans over the CPU and memory slots whilst two fans at the bottom suck air through the hard drive bays... Read review

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Advantages: online capacity expansion, deals with hard disc problems better
Disadvantages: slow compared to software RAID

...recommend upgrading to current firmware and 2.16 storcon utl (both are on www.intel.com. There is a linux version of the 2.16 storcon, but it was hard to find!) With initial installation on a Gigabyte GA7 motherboard and Adaptec 2940AU SCSI controller, the problems with onboard intel BIOS / adaptec 2940AU and mobo BIOS reared it's ugly head. I could not for the life of me with all the PCI juggling, IRQ remapping and BIOS remapping options get it to boot with a Adaptec SCSI card and Intel RAID card. I asked a friend about his setup, and he had no problems (he was running a Intel serverboard with his SRCS14L) My problem was solved by removing SCSI from system completely and migrating to IDE bootup drives (which was such a pain on linux!) Current drivers are 2.05 which are included since the 2.4.19 kernel. As with all RAID controllers... Read review

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