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Optiplex 990 Small Server Conversion
I bought an Optiplex 990 to use as a home NAS, it is the full size tower and it has a 3.3Ghz i5 with 8GB of ram. I am using a 120GB SSD for my OS/programs, and I am using HDD's for storage but I am limited in room.
For one I have to say I don't understand why they dropped the passive CPU heatsink from the 980 but I this board only has 4 SATA ports. I have 2 HDD bays, two 5.25" bays and some sort of 3.5" hanger I read is for maintenance/cloning drives upon failure.
I have two options I am deciding between; I can use a dual 5.25" bay dual HDD cooled rack I have laying around (and loose my optical which I would still use as this will be used also as an office workstation). My other thought was did they offer a taller HDD bay I can install on the right side of the case?? I am leaning toward using an external optical drive and sitting it on top of the tower that way I can have two of my drive bays cooled with a fan since the two 3.5" bays are not cooled at all...I would cool my main storage HDD and my OS SSD, my backup drive does not need to be cooled because it only synchronizes once a day then powers down after 15min (or is suppose to I should really check that to confirm) my 4th drive would be strictly for CCTV because it will be a NAS/CCTV server while also using it to browse and do work. I would be the only one accessing it and if I am doing that I am on another computer in the house (or possibly away from home) I do not think the CCTV DVR will take too much resources away from my work.
So what do you think about mounting the drives? With 3 HDDs and a SSD I am out of SATA ports to use with an optical anyway.
speedstep
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December 18th, 2015 07:00
The Velocity Gets 7.9 on the Windows Experience Index when used with a Good SSD.
Velocity Solo - Apricorn
Velocity Solo PCIe 2.0 card with two SATA III connections
Depends on what you are looking for.
The Velocity Solo uses PCI Express 2.0. It is backwards compatible with PCI Express 1.0 but it will
work at the slower speed.
What is the difference in data rate between PCIe 1.0 and PCIe 2.0?
Version 1 has a max data rate of 250 MB/s and Version 2 has a max rate of 500MB/s.
Any 2.5 SATA hard drives can be attached on the card and any standard SATA drive (Laptop or Desktop style) can be attached using the open SATA connector. It will work with both Generation 1 and 2 SATA drives but best performance is seen with Gen 2 or SSD drives.
SATA I max uncoded transfer rate is 150 MB/s (Megabytes per second), SATA II is 300 MB/s and SATA III is 600 MB/s. Most spinning disks cannot deliver data faster than SATA II and for this reason, Apricorn recommends using a high speed Solid State Disk with the Velocity Solo to achieve the greatest performance.
To use the Velocity Solo with Windows XP, you will need to download drivers from the Apricorn web site, and then follow these instructions.
1. Power down your workstation before installing the Velocity Solo card.
2. Remove the cover panel, and install the Velocity Solo in an available PCIe expansion slot.
3. Replace the cover panel, and boot your computer into Windows XP.
4. Download the driver installation file from www.apricorn.com/.../VelocitySolo_XPDrivers.zip
5. Extract the contents of the .zip file to a folder on your desktop.
6. Browse the expanded files and double click drvSetup.exe. It will be located in the folder AHCI.
7. Reboot your computer.
8. The drive attached to the Velocity Solo should now be visible in the Windows disk manager.
Note: Read Write speeds of the Solo are limited by the Marvel PCI-E controller to approximately 400 read / 200 write. If you have pci-e 1.0 bus the speed is half that.