gcheeseman

It's a system "feature" - it means they don't have any visibility of delivery dates, but the Purchasing chap has to enter something ...so they always use 5/5/15.

Alibaba Manufacturer Directory - Suppliers, Manufacturers, Exporters & Importers is a useful place to start if you need to find suppliers in China. Ths site itself is sound/legit/very widely used...but make your own commercial decisions on the suppliers you engage with.

Delta fans are good enough, and if they are all spinning at full pelt it's because they need to. It's unlikely that you'll be able to swap for something else as rack chassis and their parts tend to be proprietary (due to the challenges of pushing large quantities of air through small number of small holes. I'd check for an updated BIOS that might give greater control over temp and fan speed.

I'd be interested to know what server RM offer - and the price. I looked at their website a couple of weeks ago and the spec. was old and the price was high. We went elsewhere - although we're not tied to CC3.

I wish you the best of luck withthe Samsung drives in your server - you're going to need it!! No Samsung drives are certified for server use - or guaranteed to work properly hanging off a RAID controller. Personally, I like Samsung kit - but no way would their drives go near our servers. I'd be interested to know how many of the problems listed in this topic are caused by desktop drives being installed in a server - it's false economy. WD for Enterprise SATA (server drives, not desktop drives), Fujitsu for SCSI & SAS. We had some problems with WD, but their tech. support was spot on and a firmware fix had the problem solved.

Most drive manufacturers run a seperate product line for "Enterprise" drives. These go into servers and are generally rated with a much hight MTBF (mean time between failure). Which in practical terms means that if you take a bog-standard IDE drive and run it in a server that's taking a greater work load than a stand-alone PC, then the drive WILL fail quicker than the more expensive "Enterprise" drive. The upside is that if you RAID it, when it fails the recovery will just be another cheapo drive. If the server is V.low usage - take the savings.

The latest (soon to be available) server chipsets/CPU's from Intel outperform AMD by an unhealthy margin. So switching to AMD for anything under a 4 way system is not going to make good sense - either for performance or for price. Google for term "Woodcrest +review" to get a handful of reliable third party reviews.

Indiegirl, This should be all you need (and unfortunatly a whole lot more). Report supplied by Seagate which shows the effects on temperature on a drives reliability (about half way down the report). http://www.digit-life.com/articles/storagereliability/ Regards Gareth

We use Everest - I agree with the above, it is good. Interesting fact, normal server drive is rated at 800k hours MTBF. This assumes a max. operating temp of 52deg. For every hour spent at 1deg over this limit, MTBF reduces by 20k hours. So a bit of money spent on air con/air flow can save you money on new drives and support time!!

As per above MS are incredibly anal about where the stickers are placed ... although it's highly unlikely that anyone would ever report you They introduced the new style stickers because enterprising oriental gentlemen were knocking out counterfeit versions by the bucketful. Aside from which, every school,college, academic establishment should be using a volume licence - it's cheaper.

RDC is owned by giant reseller Computacenter. OK for pallet loads..not for small quantities.

I am told that Becta are likely to insist on SCORM 2004 'standards based' content for VLE's. And that Moodle does not meet these standards. I'm not aware of what SCORM 2004 is. Will this blow Moodle out of the water?

This thread has given me some really good insight into the options available, but has anyone got some indicative pricing to compare CC3 / Ranger / Classlink? Free is great, but I'm interested to know what the paid for solutions actually cost. Many Thanks.

Try the Epson EMP-835. It runs with 802.11g. I've not used this model, but have had excellent reliability from other Epson's in the past. It's going to set you back the best part of £2000.

It'll cost the buyer more for delivery than for the kit (especially those 17" monitors) ... some people argue that RM can't give away their new kit.