On Mon, Nov 20, 2006 at 10:57:46PM +0000, Dave Crossland wrote:
Since this is a server-grade motherboard, it requires an expensive (£200) PSU - a "24Pin 8 Pin Enermax Server Grade".
This may not be true at all. Someone up the foodchain at your dealer may have decided that customers with cash for a server-grade mobo will also have cash for the expensive PSU and hence teach their customer service that it is required - with the reality being that no motherboard needs any special PSU as long as the PSU works with the board - ie. supplies enough power (Ampere) of enough quality (voltage tolerance) on each voltage rail to meet the requirements of the whole system. I think £200 for a single PSU is over the top.
On the other hand it may be true in a worst-case scenario because the motherboard has 8 SATA ports and 2 PATA ports and a built-in SCSI controller that could connect to 15 SCSI drives and 8+4+15=27 hard drives draw a LOT of power.
I suggest that you look into power requirements for the system, possibly with a few upgrade scenarios to make the investment more future proof.
I am considering "Seagate 250Gb NCQ" harddisk, and the NCQ features are not yet supported - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_Command_Queuing#Operating_system_support
- but should be soon.
The disk will still work, just that any benefit from NCQ is lost.
I wonder about firmware status of CD/DVD Optical disk drives and sound cards.
Hard drives have firmware too.
I don't expect to see free firmware for any of these devices very soon, but will be glad the day I'm proven wrong. :)
There's been an increase in interest for optical drive firmware with the Xbox 360 though, so I guess it could happen sooner than I think.
//Peter