A while back we posted about our experience with A-Open’s S145A Mini-ITX chassis that we picked up with a bunch of Intel Mini-ITX boards.
Well, one slipped by as we received a call from a client in the middle of last week that one of their systems had seemingly died on them.
It turned out to be one of the systems we deployed with the AOpen S145A Mini-ITX case. The power supply fans are quite weak on them with the PSU actually burning out.
When we contacted AOpen for a replacement power supply, fan, or even case they referred us to our Canadian distribution points for RMA purposes. We surmise that distribution dropped them as quick as they did due to this particular problem coming back to them.
With distribution dropping the S145A AOpen would not give us _any_ warranty support at all. So, we ended up replacing _all_ of the S145A cases with Antec Minuet 350 cases that we have had a lot of success with.
The whole mess ended up costing us a lot in terms of money and time lost replacing all of those cases.
With system building being a part of our business model we have always been quite particular about the system configurations we send out the door.
- Intel processors and boards.
- Kingston or Crucial RAM
- Antec cases
- Seagate hard drives
- Intel SSD drives
- Lite-On optical
- ATI/AMD video
The above recipe has served us quite well with the exception of the Seagate firmware bug we were hit with a year or two ago. We ended up swapping out quite a few AS and NS drives. However, Western Digital was not without their problems for the high end systems built on the Raptor and VelociRaptor drives either.
So, in the end, we have learned a very expensive lesson: Stick with what we know and run with it never looking back!
Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book
*Our original iMac was stolen (previous blog post). We now have a new MacBook Pro courtesy of Vlad Mazek, owner of OWN.
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