New 1U Rackmount?

teo circular air intakes would look powerful anyway. Wonder if the move to serial ATA would mean they can get drive sizes for the tree bays to be compirable to what the current 4 drive bay model can get to?

that'd be nice. finally a decent server.

Somehow it wouldn't surprise me if it only had 3 external bays and one fixed bay internally. After all, it's not like on a current XServe you can eject the drive bay that the OS is running on and keep going, so by keeping one bay internal they can reduce that issue. The only downside is that it would reduce the "walk away" security, that is at the end of the day shutdown and take the startup disk with you.

I don't think the "walk away" security feature is used widely. More important are the mounting problems smaller shops have with this beast. A two or three U system would be nice.

Originally posted by backspinner
I don't think the "walk away" security feature is used widely. More important are the mounting problems smaller shops have with this beast. A two or three U system would be nice.

Yea, I wouldn't think so either =). But what mounting problems do you refer to? I understand the current XServe is a huge machine and practically requires 2 people to get it in the rack, but I don't know of any other problems.

From my bit of experience though, small businesses tend to have more issues finding space for racks or paying for additional racks. Place I used to work at virtually filled a rack with 4x3U equipment + KVM + Monitor + Power Supply, at most they could add 1 more 3U to that before having to buy a new rack. Equivalent 1U equipment would still give them room for 9+ more units, which given space and budget constraints would have been much nicer.

Originally posted by dstorey
teo circular air intakes would look powerful anyway. Wonder if the move to serial ATA would mean they can get drive sizes for the tree bays to be compirable to what the current 4 drive bay model can get to?

I'd guess they could get more in the 3 SATA bays. 3x250GB SATA drives = 750GB > 4x180GB = 720GB in current XServe.

And 300GB drives may be out by the time they release it, bringing it up to .9TB in 3 drives.

All arround this sounds like a good design compromise to me.

300 GB drives are already out, they just run slowly (5400 RPM)

Serial ATA drives are no larger in capacity than PATA drives. If anything, PATA has larger capacities and is much easier to find than SATA because of its marketshare. (For Now) Also, Apple uses a different connector in the XServe to provide hotswap capabilities. SATA or PATA, they still have to go through this connector anyways making the connection size savings of SATA useless. It would piss a lot of people off if they changed this, that would make all the past XServes unable to use the new modules. I'd have a feeling that Apple would suddenly stop selling the old modules as well making past xserves unable to take on more storage. Plus if you're moving and storing so much data that you need .9 TB, I'd rather have it in an XRaid using hardware RAID rather than OSX's software stuff.

Originally posted by Rincewind42
Somehow it wouldn't surprise me if it only had 3 [b]external bays and one fixed bay internally. After all, it's not like on a current XServe you can eject the drive bay that the OS is running on and keep going, so by keeping one bay internal they can reduce that issue. The only downside is that it would reduce the "walk away" security, that is at the end of the day shutdown and take the startup disk with you. [/B]

Very good point. That would leave a lot of space to employ their cheese grater cooling :)

Originally posted by ColdZero
Serial ATA drives are no larger in capacity than PATA drives. If anything, PATA has larger capacities and is much easier to find than SATA because of its marketshare. (For Now) Also, Apple uses a different connector in the XServe to provide hotswap capabilities. SATA or PATA, they still have to go through this connector anyways making the connection size savings of SATA useless. It would piss a lot of people off if they changed this, that would make all the past XServes unable to use the new modules.

Somehow I doubt that Apple will keep PATA in the Xserve line after putting it in the PowerMac line. While the savings on connector size may be irrelevant in that format, the fact that SATA is a faster protocol makes it more than a match for the Xserve.

What would be nice however is if Apple got their head out of the sand and sold the drive carriers separately so people can expand their Xserves with the drives they want to use instead of the ones that Apple wants to ship.