We then went through the same process with the Thermaltake Silver River DUO and were pleasantly surprised that the server would warm boot from any scenario. We cold booted into the BIOS, made a couple of on/off setting changes then saved and exited the BIOS screen into a warm boot. Once the USB detection steps completed, we had a 500GB NTFS formatted drive fully accessible to the OS. We installed a 500GB Seagate 7200.10 SATA drive into the BlacX SE and plugged it into the server. Even after a cold boot with a quick trip into the BIOS, the server would not warm boot. Sure enough, the server refused to warm boot on a restart requested from the OS while the Vantec NexStar was connected.

The first thing we tried to do after the server was configured and ShadowProtect was installed was to test the warm boots against the Vantec NexStar series we have on the bench. SBS 2K3 R2 Premium is installed, configured, and fully up to date. Storage is provided by two 750GB Seagate ES.2 Enterprise Storage SATA drives in a RAID 1 array. It is a 1U SR1530AHLX series with a Xeon X3220 Quad Core processor and 4GB of RAM. The server we are testing on is a box that is about to go into production. While disabling that setting did work with that particular S5000PSL server board for Kevin, disabling the setting does not seem to work with the S3000AH series boards. Legace USB Support - EnabledIn the above screen shot, it is shown enabled, because we made sure to check where the setting was at before testing the Thermaltake enclosures. Intel indicated that one needed to disable 'Legacy USB Support' in the BIOS: On a support call into Intel about a couple of S5000PSLSATA server board issues he was experiencing, he also worked with them on the no warm boot issue with the Vantec NexStar USB enclosures connected to the same board. Occasionally, we collaborate with Kevin of Atkey Tech. Thermaltake Silver River DUO - BackWith the Vantec enclosures, there is no switch to disable the eSATA feature. Thermaltake Silver River DUO Enclosure A2395The feature that caught our eye on the Silver River Duo enclosure was the USB/eSATA switch: The second product is this 3.5' USB hard drive enclosure: Power down the unit, plug in the drive, power up the unit and we have access to the hard drive and its contents. Thermaltake BlacX SEThe Thermaltake BlacX SE behaves a lot like a hot swap enclosure would in the system. We found the following Thermaltake products: A while back we blogged about the changes Vantec made to their 3.5' USB hard drive enclosures: New Vantec NexStar 3 version does not like S3000AH Intel Boards.īecause the ability to remotely warm boot our servers is mission critical, we have been on the hunt for a replacement USB enclosure product.

Vantec nexstar 3