I look after a number of HP dx2200 PCs at work; it’s a solid Pentium 4 PC with off the shelf components.  I mention that as all it’s components are standard and not crazy OEM modified items: motherboard, RAM, CPU heatsink, power supply, storage drives, everything can be replaced with a non HP part and continue to work without issue.  I wish the same could be said for most of HP’s other PCs.  Sure the dx2200 case is thin, a bit flimsy and a little noisy but it works, mostly.

My …

Picked up a Super Micro P8SCT motherboard for practically nothing and had it sitting in my pile of spare components for a few years.  I recently decided to set up a new Windows Home Server and wanted to press this motherboard into service since it has four SATA ports: they’re only SATA 1.5 but since the storage will all be accessed over my network that’s not a concern.

It’s a low end ATX server board supporting one P4 CPU, four DDR2 DIMMs, two 10/100/1000 NICs  and one PCI-X slot.  The CPU …

The BC4000 RAID HBA family, comprised of 64-bit, PCI-X low-profile compliant controller cards, are the only 2U compatible SATA RAID controller cards available today. The product family provides both four-drive (BCM4452-H) or eight-drive (BCM4852-H) support and are based on Broadcom’s new BCM5770 Serial ATA controller chip. The new Broadcom BCM5770 SATA chip and the BC4000 controller card significantly boost reliability with efficient power consumption and thermal load balancing, and feature a MTBF (mean time between failures) of 3.5 million hours, which is nearly three times greater than that of competitive …

FastTrak S150 SX4

Four-port Serial ATA RAID controller with 1.5Gbps per channel
32-Bit/66MHz PCI 2.2 interface
Support for RAID level 0, 1, 10, 5 and JBOD
Online array expansion and RAID level migration to add capacity on the fly
Supports hot swap of failed drives
Automatic/manual rebuild of hot spare drive
PerfectRAID technology for robust error handling and recovery of fatal, media and disk errors
Variable stripe block size support enables optimization for diverse application requirements
Supports up to 256MB of SDRAM memory
Seamless upgrade to Promise’s external storage solutions

Promise controllers and I are old friends, all the way back …

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 …

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® …

Storage and ATA RAID are a few focuses here at eBabble, and a drive cage is particularly handy when you want quick access to installed hard drives. In a rack mount environment drive cages become a must, as fiddling with rack screws and hauling systems off a rack is hernia inducing. Let’s take a look at the BPU-320 from iStar USA, a company making its way into the North American market.

In the box is the drive cage, three 0.5 meter SATA cables, mounting screws and a open page …