AMD Athlon MP 2200+ Server Roundup - September 2002

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On one side of the Wind Tunnel lay the two power supplies, but on the other side you'll find the partition that houses the 3-card PCI riser. Only one of the three possible PCI slots were populated, in the slot was a 3Ware IDE RAID adapter.

As you can guess, this version of the RC0222 supports IDE drives while the system is also available in a SCSI version as well. With virtually everything integrated onto the Tyan Thunder K7X motherboard, there's little need for the other two PCI slots but it doesn't hurt to have them. Just as was the case with CCSI's 1U solution, the RC0222 has retention brackets at the end of every PCI slot; you can adjust the position of the brackets by undoing a screw.

We weren't too happy with the build quality on the RC0222 as we found a screw that had already been stripped on the inside of the chassis. We would expect much higher quality control when dealing with any sort of server-class product.

Towards the front of the case you'll see connectors for the front panel as well as fan power connectors. The built in 3.5" floppy drive can be swapped out for another hard drive, potentially a boot drive to move the OS off of the RAID setup.

The use of IDE RAID in a server environment is a very interesting proposition; granted you don't get the performance levels that SCSI RAID offers but the cost savings are tangible not to mention the ability to find replacement drives more easily. While we wouldn't recommend IDE RAID for any serious database serving environments, in heavily cached web environments you may be able to get away with an IDE RAID setup. We'll be investigating the feasibility of such a setup in future articles in the Behind AnandTech series of server upgrades.