On the top left is the battery for backing up the disk cache. There is also an Ethernet port on the card used for monitoring and management of the RAID server. ![]() You can see from the photo below that the network interface card is integrated with a Fibre Channel connector for direct connection to the Xserve. The 14 drive slots are hosted by two controllers, one for bays 1-7, the other for bays 8-14. It can be used in a Windows Server Message Block share, Unix Network File System and, of course, Apple File Sharing. The cost per gigabyte is also the lowest of all enterprise-quality RAID vendors, yet the device is just as solid and stable as its competitors. This unit is well thought out, an enterprise quality workhorse that provides multiple points of fault tolerance and hot swappability. Also included in the box are two power plugs: a long one and a shorter one for connecting to rack-mounted power supplies. The rest of the ports are unchanged from those on the slot loading G4. Both Ethernet ports are on the motherboard, leaving the PCI slots for Fibre Channel cards and a display card. ![]() My particular configuration has 4GB of RAM and dual 2-GHz processors. The inside of the G5 Xserve shows Apple's usual attention to detail. I could put this on my desk and not hear any noise except for the gasps of fellow techies when they see it. Although it has eight fans, all run quietly, and only when necessary. My review can be summed up easily: The Xserve is fast - really, really fast! This box screams, yet it's incredibly quiet in operation. ![]() That's another variable managers should add into their cost of ownership calculations when evaluating the Xserve. Yet a fully loaded server running at maximum CPU and disk output uses less than 300 watts and outputs less than 1,000 British thermal units. The Apple Xserve sports 8GB of 400-MHz ECC RAM, a 128-bit memory bus and more than twice the overall throughput of an Intel Itanium 2 system.
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