Supermicro Add-on Card AOC-USAS-S4iR

Advantages: Cheap, reliable, functional.
Disadvantages: Heavy. Takes a long time to start.

.... Moving to the rear of the case, you will see that there are plenty of expansion slots for extra cards for devices such as modems, sound cards,graphics cards, etc. In fact there are a total of 8 spare PCI slots for this. There is also the standard ports for USB, Monitor, keyboard, mouse and 1 Printer port but only 1 Com port. We need 2 com ports in our office so we had to buy a card to expand this. This enabled connection to a battery back up system (Uninterupted Power Supply or UPS), also supplied by Supermicro. Moving inside, our server comes with Dual Xeon processors on board but I think they come with one as standard. You can ask for 2 when you order your machine from Supermicro. The motherboard is massive! About twice the size of a home PC or desktop. It needs to be to allow for the extra expansion ports to fit! There are enough spare... Read review

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Advantages: Great case, lots of space, room for expansion
Disadvantages: customer service, sharp edges.

...of case with 4 x 5.25 inch drive bays. sounds a lot but once you have a tape drive, cd drive, etc filling them up, you soon realise it was well worth have the room for expansion. there are untold spaces for various sized cards to fit in the re ar of the case. These all come with easily replaceable blanking plates. This also allows various shaped and sized motherboards to sit quite happily inside the case. With the huge expanse of space, you can get to work with filling this with the various storage media you want to use. AS we are running a RAID 5 system, we have 7 hard disks inside this box and there is still room for more. There are also 2 Power supplies inside the case which allows for a great redundancy set up. Be careful with the inside of these cases. I find them to be not finished in a great way so there are plenty of rough... Read review

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Advantages: Turns your PC into a Freeview Personal Video Recorder
Disadvantages: Not all PCs suited to siting in lounge

...’. There are currently some complications with this, which I’ll touch on later. Initially, when I wrote this, the Nebula card had stolen a march on the other Freeview solutions by introducing an Electronic Programme Guide of their own, downloaded from the Internet – the problem with other receiving kit at the time was that you could either only get the ‘Now & Next’ facility, or if you were really lucky, and in an area where a trial was being carried out, a programme guide stretching a whole 4 days into the future – heady stuff. Nowadays, a full 8-day EPG is available to any set top box that will listen (old OnDigital boxes won’t ever be upgraded to receive this), so it seems that Nebula are phasing out this facility. Certainly, my card now seems to be always up to date without ever needing the download. WHAT YOU GET The packaging is very satisfactory... Read review

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