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,…
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…
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. …
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…