System Builders: May Need to Stock up on Hard Drives. Flooding in Thailand is Hurting Production

It looks as though flooding in Thailand is causing problems with various hard drive manufacturer’s hard drive production.

• Flooding Thailand Hard Drive Facilities (Bing Search)
• Flooding Thailand Hard Drive Production (Bing News Search)

So far, pretty much every hard drive manufacturer has indicated that their spindled products are impacted by the flooding.

We were made aware of the situation by one of our local suppliers that has indicated that prices are on their way up.

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.

Windows Live Writer

One Slipped By – AOpen S145A Mini-ITX Chassis Fail

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.

• MPECS Inc. Blog: AOpen S145A Mini-ITX Chassis – Total Fail

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.

Windows Live Writer

150GB Raptor AHFD Series with clear view panel ...

Not being much of a gamer, nor one who extensively mods the cases we setup systems in, the Western Digital 150GB AHFD series Raptor was virtually unseen in our shop.

Until a regular ADFD series died and the only RMA drive we could get back from WD was the AHDFD series.

150GB WD AHFD Series with see-through top

It is pretty neat to see the internals of the drive working after first plugging the drive into a live system via USB.

While waiting for a command from the system, the heads sit right in the centre of the platters given them a 50/50 placement for the quickest access to the outside edge or inside edge of the platters.

Once the drive was initialized, we ran a full format to NTFS and the heads do indeed slowly work their way across the platters from the outside to the inside.

If ever you wanted to know exactly how a drive works internally while processing the various storage commands from a system, this is definitely the way.

Note the warning that accompanies the drive to very careful around the Plexiglas ... to the point that the warranty is void if the cover is damaged in any way.

Neat idea, but not the most practical. :)

This series will probably be a one-off with the advent of the small form factor VelociRaptors that outperform their older siblings by a huge margin ... and do not have the cover real estate to allow for a view port of some sort.

And, there is probably nothing too attractive running under the hood of the new Solid-State Drives either. ;)

Definitely a 10 on the geek kewl factor scale though. We are glad to have had one here to check it out.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists

*All Mac on SBS posts are posted on our in-house iMac via the Safari Web browser.

WD 300GB VelociRaptor - Wow

The new WD VelociRaptor sure are fast ... especially relative to their older sibling the Raptor.

We just finished doing a bit of tweaking and upgrading to one of our client's personal system.

The setup:

• Intel QX6700 Quad Core Extreme
• ASUS Maximus Formula
• 4GB Ballistix DDR2
• Sapphire HD 4870 512MB PCI-E Video
• 2x 300GB WD VelociRaptor in RAID 1
• Antec Nine Hundred case
• Windows Vista Ultimate 32 bit

Once we had the system together and the OS installed, the subsequent boot ups and reboots for driver updates were pretty stunning.

Off the top, the two VelociRaptors come close to performing as well as the 4 Raptors configured in a RAID 0+1 setup!

The new 300GB drives even come in a 3.5" hot swap backplane ready model too.

So, we are looking to configure a set of four in a RAID 0+1 setup to see how much of an increase in performance there will be. We would bet that the performance increase is significant over the RAID 1 VelociRaptor setup, and substantial over the Raptor RAID 0+1 setup given our experience with them this afternoon.

Western Digital is definitely one to watch in the spindle based performance category ... though with the advent of Solid-State Drives (previous blog post), WD has to hope that their significant investment in high performance spindle based drives pays off in the long run.

For now, WD VelociRaptor definitely makes performance to value sense!

From Western Digital's description:

Double the capacity - State-of-the-art technology packs twice the capacity per disk compared to its older brother WD Raptor resulting in 300 GB of high-performance storage space in this enterprise-class 2.5-inch drive. (Not compatible with notebook computers)

Note the lack of laptop support.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists

*All Mac on SBS posts are posted on our in-house iMac via the Safari Web browser.

Western Digital Raptors and Intel On Board RAID Caveats

We seem to be experiencing some hardware related hiccups specific to the 150GB Western Digital Raptors when mirrored on an Intel on board RAID controller.

We have a large number of Seagate RAID 1 mirrors on Intel on board RAID controllers and to date have not experienced this same issue under similar circumstances.

What we have been seeing is the breaking of the mirror if there is a hardware stall or freeze due to either an incorrectly installed/configured hardware driver or a malfunctioning piece of hardware that locks up the system.

So far, the breaking of the mirror seems to be isolated to the Raptors.

In one case, we had a mirror break that also took out the OS.

Keep in mind that we are only installing the Raptors into high end systems that we build in-house for key clients. This is our first run back into Western Digital drives in over five years.

However, any systems that we have put together so far that have displayed the above issues have indeed experienced the RAID 1 mirror being broken and at least needing an array rebuild or in some cases an array reinitialization and now in one case a reload of the OS.

On initial observation, it looks like the Raptors are a little more sensitive to a break in the data stream.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists

*All Mac on SBS posts are posted on our in-house iMac via the Safari Web browser.

Intel QX9650 Quad Core Extreme has a new cooling solution

We are in the process of putting a system together based on the following high performance components:

• Intel X38BT Extreme Edition Motherboard
• Intel QX9650 Quad Core Extreme CPU
• Zalman CNPS9700 LED CPU Heat Pipe Cooler
• Dual (2x) ATI Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB Graphics PCI-E
• Dual (2x) 150GB Western Digital Raptor 10K SATA 150 RAID 1
• Dual (2x) 500GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 SATA 300 RAID 1
• Creative SoundBlaster X-Fi Elite Pro
• Antec P180B Chassis
• 1200Watt (1.2KW) ThermalTake ToughPower 4 Rail
• Klipsch ProMedia Ultra 5.1

We just received the QX9650 CPU from our supplier.

We were surprised by the size of the box: It is at least twice the size of a regular Core 2 CPU box. Not only that, it weighs less than the standard Core 2 CPU box too.

Core 2 Extreme QX9650 Packaging

Once we had the packinging open, the tray holding everything has changed.

The reason for this packaging change?

Intel is trying to give Zalman a run for their money! ;)

But seriously folks, Intel is packaging a new CPU cooler for their new 45nm Extreme processors.

Here are a number of screenshots:

Intel QX9650 CPU Cooler - Top

Intel QX9650 CPU Cooler - Side

Intel QX9650 CPU Cooler - Top - No Fan

Intel QX9650 CPU Cooler - Bottom

The cooler unit itself is very light. It looks as though there is a single heat pipe within the large hollow barrel below the fan motor.

While it is a huge step in the right direction for Intel CPU cooling in that it is light weight, capable of greater cooling due to the heat pipe, and quieter because of the larger fan it will not discourage avid users from purchasing a product like the Zalman.

This is one area where Intel should learn a lesson from AMD: Package the Extreme series processor in a small environmentally friendly box and leave the CPU cooler up to us.

This way costs for packaging the CPU go down significantly and those savings can be passed along to us in the form of a price reduction on the CPU.

For the Extreme series CPU purchaser, it is pretty much a given that they already have a cooling method in mind from a good air based cooler such as the Zalman, to a water based method, or the exteme of liquid nitrogen (Live search).

UPDATE: Missed this one in the inital post:

Intel Core 2 Extreme Processor Cooling Solution

This little sheet came with the processor in the box.

Note their qualifier under Thermal performance to spare:

Designed to meet and exceed thermal performance needs for the Intel Core 2 Extreme Edition processors under normal user conditions.

This further reaffirms the need for an aftermarket CPU cooling product for those who are looking to tweak their CPU performance or are looking for optimal thermal qualities in a CPU cooler.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists

*All Mac on SBS posts are posted on our in-house iMac via the Safari Web browser.