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Ka L.

Ka L.

Joined on 02/27/07

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Product Reviews
product reviews
  • 12
Most Favorable Review

Board Review Revisited

ASUS P5NT WS ATX Server Motherboard LGA 775 NVIDIA nForce Dual PCI-E x 16 DDR2 800
ASUS P5NT WS ATX Server Motherboard LGA 775 NVIDIA nForce Dual PCI-E x 16 DDR2 800

Pros: Many, but not conjunctively in motherboard BIOS and in PCI-X. Depending on the PCI-X SCSI card installed, incompatibility may exist. Adaptec 39320 allows proper booting, but this card supports up to two arrays involving up to six physical drives disjunctively; arrays created in Adaptec BIOS are viewable in MB BIOS.

Cons: An instance exists with the LSI 320-1 SCSI card; in this card's BIOS, 'array' is synonymous with 'logical drive.' Product description reads 40-logical-drive support, and while installed in the PCI-X slot of the P5NT WS, many arrays are makable, but the option 'Select logical drive to boot from' does not function properly. If there is a single logical drive created, booting functions properly. If there are two logical drives, labelled 1 and 2, booting occurs respectively by the numbers 2 and 1 in the 'select-boot' option. if there are equal-to-greater-than three logical drives, booting is no longer supported until the number of logical drives is reduced to equal-or-less-than two.

Overall Review: Since the LSI card functions properly in other motherboards, a problem for Asus programming team is to fix the indexing in P5NT BIOS for PCI-X slot. Please do it fast... This assumes the PCI-X hardware on the board is not dysfunctional.

Most Critical Review

Roller Coaster in Relative Land of Hard Drives

Intel X25-M Mainstream 2.5" 80GB SATA II MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) SSDSA2M080G2GC
Intel X25-M Mainstream 2.5" 80GB SATA II MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) SSDSA2M080G2GC

Pros: The first install I had produced an extremely slow boot time on Windows XP; I was extremely disappointed by this, expecting immediate results. The second re-install (without any form of erase of the blocks used from the first installation) produced the boot-time result I sought; relieved, I figured the unit needed simply to be broken in, whatever this means. After about 2 or 3 weeks, this drive no longer supports boot; I thought maybe my motherboard's chipset storage controller was going bad (it is ICH7R); but no, BIOS sees the drive, and I was in fact able to re-install windows without issues with noting that the alone boot attempt failed similarly to the original boot failure of this episode. I switched the controller to my adaptec 31205 and re-installed windows yet again; this fixed the booting problem; however, the boot time reverted to the unbearably slow state I only encountered at the very beginning.

Cons: Some thoughts: It is remotely but quite possible that some of these failures are due to the appropriate rail failures in my power supply (PC Power and Cooing 610W); but at <5W to power this drive, this makes it remote. My ICH7R chipset could possibly be at fault, but other than this SSD and its roller-coaster ride there is no indication of this. I have used HDDerase to erase the blocks before the installation several times, and there is a possibility that failures could be related to this product; but this is only a coincidental detail I've encountered with problems others have had.

Overall Review: On the other hand: when this product has functioned optimally, it did produce the benchmark results mostly identical to those in the reviews of this product. It does have the fastest boot times, although somewhat negligibly compared to OCZ's products. I do like the fact that Intel's product line has more definition than that of OCZ; however, one thing that Intel's drives do not have is a block-erasing program offered by Intel that does a similar job as HDDerase but that doesn't require booting from DOS and one that is compatible with all motherboards, such as OCZ does.

Sort of like driving stick.

ABIT AW9D-MAX LGA 775 Intel 975X ATX Intel Motherboard
ABIT AW9D-MAX LGA 775 Intel 975X ATX Intel Motherboard

Pros: Well; I am using a secret ninja style of memory, and at first it didn't work but not at fault of memory; one simply needs to up the voltage on the NB, which might not have a satisfactory 'auto' setting, which thing to do was motivated by text I read on the forums of this board's manufacturer.

Cons: I am writing this instead of doing important things because I am irresponsible.

Overall Review: I need a girlfriend. I like that one girl in my math class.

nice but limited but wokable-around, but i'll see

SUPERMICRO CSE-M35SB 5 Bay SCSI HDD (Black) Enclosure
SUPERMICRO CSE-M35SB 5 Bay SCSI HDD (Black) Enclosure

Pros: Very high quality fan 90x38mm^2 on back; quality and solid construction from Korean steel. High quality tech support.

Cons: The revision 1.02 has in-connector removed from backplane due to problems with manufacturer testing of the mobile backplane together with other backplanes or daisy-chain sets-up with Adaptec controllers, I'm told. The diagram in manual still shows the second connector, however. The auto-term jumper is vestigial feature. Like, uck, mang...

Overall Review: I will use non-terminated cables available from CCM Tech to attempt daisy chain o drives anyway. Unfortunately, you can't daisy chain two of these backplanes or any of the Intel ones which also have the in-connector removed. They say everyone uses SAS now; who the luke uses scsi raid controllers to attach only five or six drives per channel (rhetorical)?

Nah, dude

SYBA SY-IDE-SATA IDE to SATA Converter
SYBA SY-IDE-SATA IDE to SATA Converter

Pros: The website for the thing says it converts sata hard drive interface to an IDE interface to hook up to your IDE port, you dummy.

Cons: Dummies like the guys below. Dumb dummy, hugh!

Overall Review: Dummy!

I have this

Intel Xeon 3070 Conroe 2.66 GHz 4MB L2 Cache LGA 775 65W BX805573070 Processor
Intel Xeon 3070 Conroe 2.66 GHz 4MB L2 Cache LGA 775 65W BX805573070 Processor

Pros: I have this.

Cons: I can't leave this field empty...

Overall Review: Haha. Thought that was all I had to say? Nope. Ah... OKay. Um... don't know about the E6700 this was rebranded from for the Xeon line, but core 0 does 2.66 GHz, core 1 2.67 GHz. Latter is typically .001 or .002 seconds slower per iteration time on this program I know... do you know? hehehe. ahh..