One of the first desktop motherboards to use Intel's new 5 Series Chipset, the Desktop Board DH55TC (which was codenamed “Tom Cove”), available for about $100 (street), demonstrates both the promise and the current limitations of Intel's latest technology. For builders interested in putting together a. Downloads Free! 100 Drivers, Utilities, Manual and BIOS for Intel Motherboard DH55TC Motherboards. Here's where you can download Free! The newest software for your Motherboard DH55TC. The Intel Desktop Board DH77EB may contain design defects or errors known as errata that may cause the product to deviate from published specifications.

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My job now involves more and more virtualised (or virtualized if you’re one of our American cousins from across the pond) server implementations so this is a good excuse to go and build my own ESX test environment. I have been reading many articles over the last few months such as those by and who have blogged about their experiences building their own VMware ESX test rig. As most of you probably know much of issues faced by those wanting to build their own cheap ESX test server is having SCSI disk on which to present the Virtual Machine File System (VMFS). There are a handful, and more with ESX v3.5, of SATA disk controllers that present the disks to ESX as being SCSI. Obviously due to the cost of SATA Vs SCSI/SAS disks this is preferable for a low cost ESX box. I was wanting a server that would offer half decent performance and wasn’t going to cost the earth.

Probably the cheapest, and one of the most hassle free ways would be to purchase an HP Compaq D530 desktop. Has blogged quite extensively and about his experiences with running ESX on the D530. A basic model can be picked up on EBay from about £80 (with minimum memory and disk) though it would be worth hunting around for a version with the 2.8Ghz Hyper Threaded (HT) CPU which will offer more in the way of performance. The D530 is an attractive little unit on many fronts though I was a little concerned about the performance as ESX and it’s VM’s would be running off of a single hard drive. Although this would be fine for any low/moderate resource intensive VM’s I was hoping for something which would give me that added flexibility of a little more horse-power under the hood, especially in the area of disk access speeds. I have an existing homemade desktop machine which has an AMD X2 4200 CPU, 4GB memory and onboard RAID 0 SATA II 320GB hard disks which runs very well. Delta Phenomenon Welles Wilder Pdf Writer more.

All I would have to have added to this PC is an SATA controller such as the LSI MegaRaid 150 and a compatible network adapter. The LSI MegaRaid 150 is a 64bit PCI adapter and as such I would have lost valuable bandwidth as my ABit motherboard only had 32bit PCI slots available.

So to get the most out of the disk controller I would have had to have purchased a new motherboard and in using my existing PC as a dedicated ESX test rig I would be down one PC that I use for all my day to day computing bits and pieces. After much more trawling of VM forums regarding ESX white boxes I decided to take the plunge and go for an entry level HP server with an entry level ESX certified disk controller. As budget is an issue the HP Proliant ML110 (Intel) or HP ML115 (AMD) seemed like an obvious choice. I have worked with HP Proliants for a number of years now and have always been impressed with their build quality and reliability even on low end models. Both the ML110 and ML115 have onboard SATA raid though there wasn’t any clear definitive information on whether the controller would allow the SATA disks to be seen as SCSI based by ESX – as is necessary for the VMFS volume.

This wasn’t to be an issue however as I had also decided to buy and install an HP Smart Array e200i Controller. This controller can control both SATA and SAS drives so offered some future proofing for when SAS drives become more affordable and mainstream in the home market. Unfortunately the e200i only offers SATA I (1.5Gb/s) speeds though hopefully by using 2 disks in a RAID 0 (Ok, I know where’s the redundancy?