Boston Green Power 1300-T review

The embedded RAID controller can be managed using Intel’s Matrix Storage Manager software, which provides an overview of the arrays and their status. You can use it to create and modify arrays, and it also drops an icon into the System Tray, which provides pop-up messages and alerts if anything untoward is spotted.

Removing the lid reveals a compact Supermicro X8SIL-F motherboard with the Xeon processor mounted by a solid passive heatsink. There’s a lot of space around this board so airflow won’t be impeded.

Four small dual-rotor fans provide all chassis air movement, and noise levels are commendably low. They’re on a par with Broadberry’s X34-104L, and much quieter than Dell’s PowerEdge R210.

The 1300-T sports Intel’s higher end 3420 chipset, which delivers six SATA interfaces and has an integrated RAID controller that supports stripes, mirrors and RAID5 arrays. Alas, Boston hasn’t been very imaginative in supporting all drive bays, as we found the motherboard come up short in this department.

One of the embedded SATA interfaces services the DVD drive while the other five are cabled to the drive backplane. All very nice, but the motherboard doesn’t really suit this chassis since it can only support all eight bays with an extra RAID card.

The only Socket 1156 motherboard in Supermicro’s arsenal that can handle all the drive bays is the X8SI6-F variant. Along with six embedded SATA ports it also has an on-board eight-port LSI SAS controller, which offers optional hardware RAID5 and supports the latest 6Gbits/sec SAS drives.

Storage issues aside, we found the 1300-T a thrifty customer in our power consumption tests, with it drawing a modest 40W with Server 2008 in idle. With SiSoft Sandra thrashing all eight cores, we saw this peak at 80W. This is very similar to the Broadberry X34-104L Supermicro server, showing that the low-power Xeon L3426 is doing its stuff.

There aren’t many 1U rack servers around that can support eight SFF hot-swap drive bays, which make the Green Power 1300-T rather unusual. It’s also low on power consumption and offers full remote management as standard, although a more appropriate motherboard or extra RAID controller is needed to realise its full storage potential.