IBM PC Server 500

I had two of these systems. The one pictured below, and that served for a few years hosting my "Greyghost" site, has gone on to a new home in New York. The other is little more than a nearly empty case and needs to find a new home at some point. (There's still a planar in the latter, and maybe the Pentium 90 processor complex as well.)

As much as I wanted to like these computers, the "type II" hard drive backplanes were a near constant source of grief. Reliable delivery of power to the hard drives seemed to be the biggest problem. The "Cheetah" RAID adapter was even worse. Evidently it was at one time considered acceptable for a RAID adapter not to maintain the parity volume automatically. I'm not really sure who thought that was a good idea, or how the RAID adapter could cope with a disk failure using parity information while being unable to rebuild the array once a bad drive was replaced if one did not religiously take the system offline and update the stored parity information with the RAID utilities boot disketted.

(Yes, the IBM NetFinity utilities provided Windows and OS/2 RAID adapter management software for this purpose. However, it was not freely available. I came across a copy of it at some point, and found the RAID utilities provided there were pretty hokey.)

Eventually I grew tired of this system's antics. After the basement flood of 2004 wiped out all of its hard drives, it sat unused until 2010. I made a halfhearted effort to clean things up and resurrect it. Then the antics started up again with the hard drive backplanes and I decided that enough was enough. In 2024 or so, I passed it on to the next owner.

"Greyghost"

Greyghost was configured as follows:

Intel Pentium 90 CPU
256MB ECC RAM
2.88MB Floppy Drive
DDS-2 tape streamer internal CD-ROM drive
Pioneer DRM-624X 6 disc external SCSI CD-changer
12X RAID hot swap drives in two logical drives/arrays.

The option cards in Greyghost were:
3COM 3C529-TP Ethernet NIC
IBM/Cirrus Logic Server SVGA card
2X IBM Fast Wide Streaming RAID (FWSR) "Cheetah" RAID Adapters
IBM MCA SCSI with 2MB cache--"Spock" adapter
Adaptec AHA-1640 MCA SCSI adapter

You may wonder about the number of SCSI cards installed in this system. While this is an unusual configuration, it is necessary for the following reasons:

1. There is not enough SCSI "address space" on the IBM "Spock" adapter to handle the DDS-2 tape streamer, internal CD-ROM drive AND the external Pioneer changer. While the Pioneer changer's drives appear as logical units under one physical unit ID, I don't think the NT driver handles this correctly and in any case either the internal CD or DDS-2 streamer gets pushed out of the picture. I think NT's drivers are to blame for this as the setup does show correctly in systems programs.

2. Of the two IBM FWSR adapters installed, one is being used at full capacity managing two arrays on each of its two SCSI channels. The other adapter is installed but presently unused for future expansion purposes into the third RAID channel that the system supports. The DDS streamer and internal CD-ROM are not attached via the pass-through cable to the FWSR adapter because this causes problems with Windows NT setup and I wanted to avoid these problems easily.

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