Intel DQ35JO

Well I bought this board after spending about an hour on the net at the store as the board does not come with a manual it is on the CD. But no BIOS setup info in there. I had to find it at Intel's site.

Basically I cleared the CMOS. Rebooted disable everything on board. audio, 1394 etc... left everything else as is. you cannot disable power management with this board I set it to State 1 instead of 3 and did not allow to wake from anything. You can also not turn off or change WOL for some reason. I left USB as legacy and set SATA to IDE. I have no drives installed yet to see how that is going to work.

Now! the boot menu - turn on advance view. My Kingston is seen as a hard drive so I disable all other boot methods. enabled boot from USB, there is a selection for BOOT from USB first on or off it did not seem to matter, I would guess once there are some drives for it too look at as well this may change. There is a USB Memory allocation setting in the boot section and this is what did it for me. I had to set it to SIZE and 0 to get it booting and then it was fine, I booted it from cold about 10 times to root and it was fine. I set it up on my network and it's seen fine there as well. I can run the Management Utlity as well no problems.

I did have to add acpi=off to the syslinux config file as the the first boot hung at ACPI / PCI X but after that it was A-1

board

6 sata 2 ide they use one of the sata ports to run to the ext. esata backplane (included) 1 pcix16, 1 pci 2 pcix1 12 usb ports 6 on the backplane and 6 on board in pinouts. MATX format. ich9d0 newest gig lan (1) NO PS2 ports on board you need a USB keyboard all USB ports a 2.0, I read that if you set USB to legacy it forces them to 1.1.

Clean board overall. Harder to get working then my P5Pe-VM in the first server but I got the board and open box (20Min) not installed C2D 4500-800 2 x 512GB 800 2 10' cat 5e cables, WD 500AAKS for $420

Time to install some drives. This will be my new file/data server to replace my old NOIsy Super Micro UW Scsi machine upstairs I will also use as a swap drive for my Media server when I am flopping files around. But best of all, nobody in the house will be putting files on the Media server any more except me and they will be Media files only no backups and data files.

I built this in an ANTEC 900 with an enermax 620 PSU totally modular but not cheap at 150$ very stable once I have the drives installed and working I will do a draw test while loading the system some. Helps to have commercial electricians in the family.

I like this Antec case very much. It comes with 2 x 3 - 3.5" rack bays that slide into 5.25 slots and each of those bays have a nice blue led fan attached and then there is a 200mm fan in the top of the case and a 120 in the rear all included from Antel. There are spots for more (if you need them) The fans mounted in front of the drives blow air into the chassis and then the 200mm fan sucks air out as well as the 120mm in the rear. I can put 9 drives in this case - But I will tell you this is the quietest case I have ever heard you do not even know it running even with all those fans, they are on low.

I am thinking of selling my Cooler Master stacker and replacing it with another 900 case. The stacker is a one PSU model only. I'm open to offers. I have the box and all the accesories that were included.  I am thinking that with the price of drives falling and now with two servers running I could have 16Tb today if I wanted to 2 drives to parity or there would be 18.

Regards,

Dave