On July 24th we finally got the server that I mentioned in this post. It took a while to get all the data switched over from the old server to the knew one. I finally finished last weekend on the 12th of August. The new server is quite nice.
It is actually the last of the Xeon P4 based line. It has dual cores with hyper threading, as a result it reports 4 CPUs for a single socket. The server also comes with a Serial Attached SCSI controller. It is nice since it can handle SAS and SATA drives with the same high end RAID controller.
One of the features I was really looking forward to was Single Instance Storage for the file system. It enables redundant files to be removed without any change noticed by end users. It happens at a level so the user doesn't notice. On about 700 GB of drivers we were able to recover over 60 GB of space. The nice thing is it works well in conjunction with VSS and NTFS compression as well.
This server pretty much has all the features I was hoping for in a Windows based NAS when we got the PV775 several years ago. Hopefully this new one will lack the bugs of the last one.
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