I'm in the market for something like that, but the 2 gig memory slot maximum may be a little light by the time you hook a few users up wouldn't it? I want something to unify all my storage and processing in the area and not need to run 3 systems just in my house to handle the wife, myself and the home entertainment.

... if it weren't for the 2GB RAM limit. I'd like to see at least 8GB so I can run some VMs on there. Then SOHOs could run multiple servers on one box and make a saving in hardware and energy costs. Seems like a missed opportunity, especially given it's got massive storage potential with 4 drive bays and RAID 5.

So, it would make a useful storage box but not a lot else.

Shouldn't this story be under reg hardware?!

Mine's the one with a copy of VMware Server in the pocket.

SOHO requirements,

Small for factor (whats the point of piss weak full tower server)

Integrated raid (essential, and if you want cheap make is SATA and more than four disks).

Low power but powerful - this is the bit that bites. As soon as people as SOHO immediatly single processor pentium gets dragged out of the stock cupboard.

HP did a really nice attempt with their homeserver. Nice for factor, nice power usage. Crap memory, crap OS, no raid.

So HP sylye, twice as tall (twice as many disks min 8Tb) 4Gb ram, and dual processor (possibly dual/quad core) but with the ability to throttle down.

Reasons.

SOHO - media servers (large storage req) , SMB (small medium business) servers - proberbly involving VM ware and multi OS images, web servers (you cant beat Linux for this).

Most of the time the machine will be idle (hence the single socket pentium is ideal). However every once in a while it might need to do on the fly video re-encoding, or may be required to activate and run external cctv. The pentium woiuld struggle. If used as a media server large capacity storage will be required, if used for small business redundancy/busisness continuity will be essential.

Santa can please have the above for Christmas.

I presume by this you mean something for which you need special drivers and that you can set up in the controllers BIOS? I've never come across one of those where the RAID isn't actually implemented in the driver rather than the controller's firmware and, well, what's the point? You might as well use the RAID built into the OS -- that's md on linux.

My dodgy old Asus A7N8X Deluxe* had 'integrated RAID' - that is, a Silicon Image 3112 processor on teh southbridge with it's own BIOS setup, much like an add in card - hardware RAID 0 and 1 can be set up from that, outside the OS, much like an add-in card.

Are you thinking of the Intel software raid in ICH chipsets or something?

I was thinking, for a while reading that article, that one of those with OpenFiler [google it...] or OpenSolaris set up as an NFS share would make a nice wee NAS with RAID5 set up - even if it was software, or ZFS.....but then again, an Atom chipset with a PCI four port SATA card would probably end up cheaper and for a NAS, I can't see the performance being massively slower with the same amount of RAM.

Oh well, back to the drawing board I suppose.

Steven R

*For the record, that board is now about six years old, and is still hapily running a Thoroughbred XP2400 at 210Mhz with a 12x multiplier, RAID0 over two SATA drives, three IDE hard drives, a DVD burner, and an AGPx8 Radeon X1650. Fucking brilliant motherboard, never a problem with it!

That's typing up a press release because it's almost christmas and someone wants to pop down to the pubs early.

Odds on that "raid" controller is the crap SATAraid from intel in the ICH known to the linux world as fakeraid, and available on motherboards from every vendor in creation.

the ram? Be ready to test it for faults yourself. (Learn to love memtest, as I had to *after* rma'ing a supermicro 'workstation' a few years back - and getting exactly the same shite back in the door. I did the ram tests myself, then got ram that worked. Glad it wasn't the slots, I suppose.)

The power supply? 300 w? I understand not needing a full bore 1200 w supply, but topping out at 300 is weak, to say the very least. The slavishly copied press release didn't mention, can it be fitted redundantly? Of course not, which is why it didn't come up.

my advice: never buy from "super red dot" as this outfit is known hereabouts. Apparently back in 486 days they did quality builds. Long since past, those days.

Now, look at any major linux vendor's site for supermicro products that have been qualified. Perhaps they've started qualifying them lately, but as of two years ago, they were too effing cheap to qualify their systems with linux distros.

I honestly don't get why the reg thinks this is more or less than anyone else's tower PC.

Whats the point ?. With the prices of mainstream servers plumiting at the moment.

HP are offiering sill discounts at the moment.

Ive just got some HP Proliant ML370 G5 tower servers, fully kitted out with max redundancy for 1800 UK pounds each !. With Rack conversion kits at 200, it makes the tower server 500 cheaper rack mount version. HP are just trying to shift stock.

If i was supporting a small office, i know which i would rather use.