We got something good in the mail last week!

Some quick observations:

The build quality is outstanding. Nothing cheap at all about this card. The engineering that has gone into this shows in every way.

It is made up of modules that are screwed down, I can see where they really thought this through so each rev of the card doesn’t require all new PCB’s to be manufactured.

It does require an external source of power via 4 pin Molex or SATA power connector period. Make sure your server has one available, even though these are sold by HP not all HP servers have the required connectors.

PCIe expander bays are few and far between. The issue is most of these are used to expand desktops, laptops or used in non critical applications mostly AV or render farms.

http://www.magma.com/products/pciexpress/expressbox4-1u/index.html

This is a nice chassis but they are currently being retooled and won’t be available for a month or so. It is the only 1U and it has redundant power.

It exposes two drives to the OS per card. We will initially configure them two per machine in a RAID 10 array for redundancy.

More to come!

Wes