I am thinking about buying some 1U servers from Rackable. They told it is can't do more that 3GB of ram and can only hold a cdrom if I want 2 harddrives. Heres what he said

"I need to make you aware of one minor issue
that was uncovered with this configuration. We
do not have enough room when going to two HDDs in
this chassis for a CDROM & FDD drive. But, we have a
very reliable and lower cost option available.
It is a self - powered SCSI connector port that pokes
out the front of the chassis which allows you to
walk up with any CD drive, plug it in (it's self
powered at the connector) and do your load.

Next, the Tyan 2518 at this time, we are advised *CAN NOT*
support more than 3GB of DRAM. We're working with Tyan to resolve this issue, but at this point in time we can only recommend 3GB. It is a Tyan issue only and should be resolved soon."

Maybe their 1U cases are outdated. Anyone have experience with this motherboard?

http://tyan.com/products/html/thunderlet.html

They are obviously lieing to you in many aspects. First being about the ram, it supports up to 4 gigs of register PC133 SDRAM. And tyan doesn't have an issue supporting this, I do not see why they are saying this. If there cases cannot fit 2 hard drives, this tells me the cases are very tight, and have horrible air flow which can cause problems down the line. Your best solution would be dual 40 gig HD raid, doing either mirrors or stripping. Striping allows you to get twice the speed and the combined space, where mirroring basicly uses the other hard drive as a back up(coppies the other HD) there for it gets the name mirroring. This board is a dual processor board so your looking for anything P3 800 and up. That would be a nice system. My suggestion would be to go with another dedicated provider, because if they cannot tell you a correct answer, this can cause problems building a good client/company relationship.

Originally posted by ClusterMania
I am thinking about buying some 1U servers from Rackable. They told it is can't do more that 3GB of ram and can only hold a cdrom if I want 2 harddrives. Heres what he said

"I need to make you aware of one minor issue
that was uncovered with this configuration. We
do not have enough room when going to two HDDs in
this chassis for a CDROM & FDD drive. But, we have a
very reliable and lower cost option available.
It is a self - powered SCSI connector port that pokes
out the front of the chassis which allows you to
walk up with any CD drive, plug it in (it's self
powered at the connector) and do your load.

Next, the Tyan 2518 at this time, we are advised *CAN NOT*
support more than 3GB of DRAM. We're working with Tyan to resolve this issue, but at this point in time we can only recommend 3GB. It is a Tyan issue only and should be resolved soon."

Maybe their 1U cases are outdated. Anyone have experience with this motherboard?

The Tyan is very picky about having all 4 DIMMs filled with 1Gb chips, I think there are only about 5 that are certified by Tyan to work. I can tell you from experience that Kingston DIMMs do not work at 4Gb, Corsair do, but are $100 more per DIMM.

We decided that 1Gb extra RAM wasn't worth $400 especially seen as the server it was going in is just going to be doing web and dns, the email and databases are going to be handled on another couple of servers.

As for the drives, Total Host is right, you should be able to get 2 hard disks a floppy and slim cd rom in most 1U cases.

For anyone that is interest in the server we have the Thnder LET in, it's here: www.storm.uk.co/sysinfo/

Originally posted by KDAWebServices
The Tyan is very picky about having all 4 DIMMs filled with 1Gb chips, I think there are only about 5 that are certified by Tyan to work. I can tell you from experience that Kingston DIMMs do not work at 4Gb, Corsair do, but are $100 more per DIMM.

We decided that 1Gb extra RAM wasn't worth $400 especially seen as the server it was going in is just going to be doing web and dns, the email and databases are going to be handled on another couple of servers.

As for the drives, Total Host is right, you should be able to get 2 hard disks a floppy and slim cd rom in most 1U cases.

For anyone that is interest in the server we have the Thnder LET in, it's here: www.storm.uk.co/sysinfo/

Will Crucial ram work with it? The sales person said it won't but everything looks fine to me.

http://www.crucial.com/store/PartSpecs.asp?imodule=CT128M72S4R75

If you bought 4 of those it should work, I would call Tyan. As long as they are registered ECC ram and installed in pairs there should be no problem. Verify this with Tyan before making the move.

Originally posted by TotalHst
If you bought 4 of those it should work, I would call Tyan. As long as they are registered ECC ram and installed in pairs there should be no problem. Verify this with Tyan before making the move.

He quoted 1GB of PC133, ECC DRAM = $345

I find that very expensive so I am planning to buy 1GB from them and 3GB from Crucial. Since you said I have to buy them in pairs, I have to buy 2 gig from each vendors?

If it's not on the Tyan list then it most likely won't work with 4gb installed. The Kingston memory we used was ECC registed, in fact it used the same memory chips (Samsung) as the Corsair DIMMs but would still not work.

I baught this board in a server last week. I was told the ram is required to be installed in pairs. I didnt argue since I was only putting 1gb ram in total, so 2x512 was fine. As far as the board goes its kickin ass just like its little brother the 2510 that I have 2 of. I have them with the scsi onboard and I have not had any problems. Only thing is that if you poweron w/o a keyboard and plug it in later....it still wont work, so get a kvm or a sep keyboard for it.