Serving up ForceWare
The nForce3 250Gb's updated hardware spec looks impressive, but it takes more than just on-chip resources to make the 250Gb sing. NVIDIA has updated its ForceWare driver package to take advantage of the 250Gb's capabilities, and the new software is pretty slick.

NVIDIA's nvRAID utility lets users manage and configure multiple arrays, spare disks, or hot standby drives connected to the 250Gb's ATA/133 and Serial ATA ports. The utility could use a remote notification scheme for disk failures, though.

On the audio front, NVIDIA has updated its mixer software to fit in with ForceWare's slick user interface. Unfortunately, the 250Gb's anemic audio capabilities don't offer much in the way of exciting features for the mixer to exploit.

There's only so much software can do to take advantage of the 250Gb's RAID and audio capabilities, but its hardware-accelerated firewall is different. Although key components of the firewall reside in hardware, the interface is all software.

Users can opt to control the 250Gb's firewall with a command-line interface, but the default web-based interface is pretty sweet. The firewall supports both stateful and stateless inspections, port blocking and filtering, remote administration, and WMI scripts in addition to protection against spoofing, sniffing, and ARP cache poisoning. The firewall can prevent a system from acting as a DHCP server, too. If all that sounds like Greek to you, NVIDIA includes a set of predefined profiles and setup wizards to help uninitiated users through the process of configuring the firewall.

The firewall's wizards mostly cover opening ports for specific types of applications, such as game servers, IM clients, and email. Pre-defined security profiles manage the rest of the firewall's capabilities, and users can easily create new profiles of their own or modify existing ones to suit their needs. If you're really paranoid about network security, you can even run the firewall in stealth mode where the machine is essentially invisible to the outside world—hackers can't attack what they can't see.

Combined with the 250Gb's hardware acceleration, NVIDIA's personal firewall software is a pretty compelling option for both home users and corporate environments. The fact that the firewall is so easy to configure and use could be particularly beneficial for those uncomfortable running a firewall they can't easily adjust.