Computer servers are dedicated machine to handle high demand software applications. The concern most small time businesses face is that more computing power packed computer servers don’t come cheap. There are times that an inexpensive desktop computer would be used as a server of various software applications.

In our office, cost is a primary factor when investing in IT infrastructure. Thus, we have to use sometimes desktop computer and high-end workstations prior to investing on a real full power computer server. Desktop computer could be used to do remote backup, host web server applications or video streaming server temporarily for testing and other purposes, which would run for several weeks.

Host-based RAID controller technology maximizes system performance and uptime at a very affordable cost. Thus, we use Serial ATA drives or Serial ATA II drives coupled with Adaptec Serial ATA II RAID 1420SA card in our projects. This gives an easy upgrade path to a high performance hardware RAID controller whenever everything is ready.

The benefits of host-based RAID are that data is protected by the same Adaptec RAID code. Adaptec HostRAID provides RAID 0,1, and 10 data protection at high speed streaming performance of up to 3 Gbit/s data rate. There is an Adaptec Storage Manager software that allows remote management, monitoring, and configuration of RAID arrays. In our case, Adaptec Host-based RAID controller boosted performance and uptime of our high-bandwidth video streaming applications, web applications, and remote data backup needs on a desktop computer.