THERMALTAKE
Blac SATA Hard Drive Dock: $29
www.thermaltakeusa.com

CUSTOMERS WHO NEED A LOT OF STORAGE NATURALLY HAVE a lot of hard drives. And the great part about today’s SATA and SAS serial technologies is that they support hot-swapping, meaning removing a drive without fi rst powering down the system and replacing it with another drive. As long as your customers’ servers and workstations support hot-swap drive bays, you can move data around easily, causing no disruption as you transfer, upgrade, and expand storage solutions.

Thermaltake drew inspiration from the hot-swap concept and built its Blac, a hard drive dock that can host bare drives. In implementation, the dock is really very simple. A sturdy plastic stand lets your customer plug in a 3.5” or 2.5” SATA disk vertically, locking it into place. A USB 2.0 connection from the dock to a host system facilitates transfer speeds of up to 480 Mb/s without the need for any extra software. All Windows and Mac operating systems are supported. One quick button press detaches the installed drive with staggered power and data pins to prevent an electrical short.

We’d love to see the Blac in eSATA trim for faster data transfers. But at $29, the current iteration still makes for a great play on saving your customers plenty of time as they move information.

ARCTIC COOLING
Freezer 7 Pro CPU Fan/Heatsink: $29
www.arcticcooling.com

BOXED PROCESSORS ARE GREAT for combining CPUs with reference cooling solutions that do the trick. But when you want to save money with a more system integrator-oriented cooler or take a step higher into premium cooling, tray processors give you that fl exibility.

Arctic Cooling’s Freezer 7 Pro is great for SIs with tray chips and a desire to improve on Intel’s standard heatsink and fan. The unit’s copper base sends heat up through pipes and into an array of fi ns. A 92mm fan blows air through the array at variable speeds, leveraging a four-wire motherboard connection to control an onboard PWM chip. The Freezer 7 isn’t particularly fancy, but it does do a great job of increasing cooling performance while cutting back on noise.

ASUS
RS100-X5/P12 1U Server: $349
www.asus.com

WHILE THERE ARE TREMENDOUS BENEFITS TO ADOPTING rackmounted hardware, SAN storage, and virtualization, not every small business needs a big push into enterprise-class technology. ASUS has just the ticket for SMBs that need to centralize information, want to host their own presence, and understand the importance of carefully confi gured security policies. The company’s RS100-X5/ PI2 is a single-processor, 1U platform that runs with less than 30 dB of acoustic output. How does ASUS achieve whisper-quiet operation in a space-constrained 1U enclosure? It leverages a lot of the same heat pipe technology found on its motherboards to dissipate heat from the processor and motherboard northbridge. ASUS’s design results in a very low-energy, low-noise footprint. According to the company, its server consumes only 89W under full load. That’s a far cry from the power draw you’d see from multi-processor boxes with stacks of hard drives and rows of FB-DIMM memory.

Nevertheless, ASUS is still able to offer a compelling business solution through support for Intel’s 65W dual core Xeon 3000 series processors. The onboard 945GC chipset and ICH7 I/O controller are pulled from Intel’s desktop lineup but in this case serve the power-sipping platform well. Two DIMM slots take up to 2GB of DDR2 667 memory, a pair of SATA connectors hook up to internal drive bays, and a pair of Marvel Gigabit Ethernet controllers allow a variety of network confi gurations. There’s even a single PCI Express x16 slot (with a x1 electronic link) for add-in expansion. A thoroughbred the RD100-X5/PI2 is not. However, as an attractive, quiet, entrylevel server that won’t gulp down the power, yet still delivers a reliable experience through an Intel Xeon processor, ASUS’s box is ideal.

SEAGATE
Momentus 5400/4 250GB Hard Drive: $165
www.seagate.com

THE SHIFT TO PERPENDICULAR magnetic recording technology has done huge things for the maximum capacity of today’s most popular drive form factors. Most telling is the 1TB milestone achieved with desktop 3.5” SATA drives. Now Seagate’s secondgeneration spin of perpendicular recording is yielding similarly impressive gains in its 2.5” notebook drives. The latest Momentus 5400.4 drives are based on that new technology and are now reaching capacities as high as 250GB. Imagine that. One quarter of a terabyte in a tiny 2.5” chassis, all from a 56% increase in areal density from the Momentus 5400.3 models.

Each drive comes with 8MB of cache, spins at 5400 RPM, and can sustain transfer rates right around 58 MB/s. Beyond performance, Seagate makes it a point to prioritize power management and reliability. The 250GB variant sips a scant .6W while idle and 2W while seeking or reading. It’ll also take up to 325G of operating shock or 900G of non-operating shock, making it an ideal solution for notebooks that might get jostled around a bit.

Seagate’s reseller support system is one of the top reasons to go with the Momentus 5400.4. If a customer wants the drive’s higher capacity but needs to fi nd a way to migrate over from a smaller drive, Seagate offers its DiscWizard software as a free download to do just that. Moreover, a fi ve-year warranty protects the hardware against failure.