Joined on 09/23/02
Works Great
Pros: Works as advertised, XP boots on my Kiosk's based on Dell Optiplex GX150 Motherboards. Used with Ridata 4GB CF cards, no jumpers or settings to adjust, looks just like a 4GB drive.
Cons: Not as fast as a Hard Drive but we knew that before we purchased it.
Overall Review: First I was amazed by how fast the machine did run, I expected boot times to be very slow but they are actually faster. Anything requiring seek times will be quicker however moving large files will be noticeably slower. This is an amazingly cheap solution for anyone needing to build a kiosk where moving parts can lead to failures and lost sales. 1. No moving parts 2. No heat. 3. Less power
Power Supply Issues
Pros: Works great with Engenius's older ES18U48-P1J power supplies.
Cons: Will not pass data more then a few days with provided PA1-1024-4DU power supplies.
Overall Review: Engenius support was terrible until I demanded to speak with a manger who put me in touch with someone that had a clue. Engenius recently changed their 48v ES18U48-P1J power supplies with newer faulty PA1-1024-4DU power supplies. Despite being past warranty they replaced all our power supplies and resolving our issue.
Replacing the Batteries
Pros: Price.
Cons: Batteries are cheap and has limited functionality regarding load, battery percentage or run times.
Overall Review: Regarding the previous reviewer using a hammer to remove the battery tray. When the batteries fail they can expand making it impossible to simply pull out the battery tray by hand. I used two Quick Grip clamps and the tray came out effortlessly in seconds. Just put one part of the clamp behind the batteries and the other part on the frame and clamp.
Portable Server..
Pros: Exactly the size I was looking for in a portable server. Loved the handle
Cons: Arrived with a broken CD Door Useless 7" top bay Cheap front CD Door Mechanism. * I bought this case knowing I wasn't going to keep the front faceplate anyhow *
Overall Review: A great server mod… I replaced the front panel with my own custom aluminum panel. The new face fits a three SATA backplane I purchased on Newegg along a power switch. Additionally I had to make some modifications to the drive trays to support the larger backplane. The modifications was easy and there was plenty of room available for the mod. I also replaced the ultra quite rear 60mm fans with louder 6000rpm RPM version to improve cooling significantly. The case now has 3 hot swappable SATA drives attached to a Highpoint 3510 raid controller running Raid 5. Burst rate is over 1100mb/s with an average sustain speed of 220mb/s. I’m currently using a q9450 CPU and 4GB of 1333mhz ram all running stable on Windows 2003 Server. The server was designed to import, downsize and host 50,000-100,000 photos for 32 kiosk viewing stations. Often we have 3-4 memory cards importing at once. This server has significantly outperformed our older Dell PowerEdge 2800’s and is extremel
Not good
Pros: Price.
Cons: Corrupt images and corrupt files when used with a CF to IDE adapter.
Overall Review: I loved the Ridata 150x cards, we have taken over 500,000 photos using these cards with no problems. Recently we purchased 16 Ridata 233x cards for our kiosk stations and over 3 weeks every koisk failed claiming the os was corrupt or simply stopped booting. Our other 16 kiosks using the older 150x cards never had a problem and are still running. After the bad experience using them as CF-IDE drives we decided to just use them with our cameras however we have seen 20-30 corrupt images since using them. Bottom line. I have 16 of these cards and I don't trust any of them..
3 out of 5
Pros: Great Value and performance.
Cons: 1 of the 5 drives I purchased was DOA.
Overall Review: Their tech support bounced me around for 1 hour until I decided to give up.