You've decided to build your own external hard drive chassis. You bought your drives and a bare chassis to house them. You've read Patrick's first and second build articles plus my article on the Supermicro power board. Now you are figuring out which disk cables and adapters you need to wire it all together - and it's starting to get a bit complex. If...
AMD has brought their newest Piledriver architecture to two more product lines. The AMD Opteron 4300 series is a socket C32 solution meant for single and dual socket configurations. The AMD Opteron 3300 series uses the familiar AM3+ socket used by many desktop computers. Piledriver based parts are expected to deliver 15% better performance than their predecessors. Let's take...
The Intel Xeon E5-2600 is a large chip and can have 8-12 DIMM slots per CPU. In dual socket configurations, that means there is not a lot of real estate for heatsink assemblies. The standard square ILM is fairly large so there is an alternative, the narrow ILM. The big advantage of the narrow ILM is that it allows...
Many users of this site purchase server pulls of IBM ServeRAID and LSI MegaRAID cards to complete systems. A common focus is on RAID controller server pulls. LSI SAS 2008 and LSI SAS 2108 based cards are very popular since they are often included in systems and pulled in datacenters. Also, liquidators will sell cards separately on off lease...
For those reading my posts on the Microsoft Surface, I have mixed feelings about the device. It has a great form factor. An awesome set of inputs (keyboard, mouse and touch) all in one easy to carry form factor. Sure, I have had two Microsoft Surface Touch Cover failures in the first month, but I still think it is...
Today's article introduces a $50 circuit board that can save you $500. Interested? The board is the Supermicro CSE-PTJBOD-CB1 JBOD power board and it helps turn a standard computer chassis into a DIY JBOD chassis. You aren't supposed to know about this board - it's sold as a spare part for a complete Supermicro JBOD system - but it's too useful to...
This weekend I was doing some work on the new ServeTheHome storage test bed. It is a very fast machine. Once I got Windows Server 2012 working on the Supermicro X9DR7-LN4F, I ran into some troubling issues. I first added five different SSD combinations onto the onboard SAS 2308 controller. Write performance was simply abysmal. Benchmarking on an Intel...
This week the Internet has been abuzz about a SemiAccurate report that Intel’s Broadwell CPU is going to be BGA only. The immediate view of this is that the end of the era where users can tweak their PC’s. I don’t think that is necessarily the case and this article will go into a few brief reasons. First, Broadwell...
Rich Chomiczewski or "Spotswood" is a community member known for making some cool PC enclosures. Rich is best known for his work on custom metal and wood enclosures. As I was in the throws of quad socket G34 reviews last year, I purchased three of his stackable 4P trays. Due to the lab's focus on single socket systems in...
Today we are looking at the ASUS KGPE-D16 which is a very popular server platform for AMD Opteron 6000 series processors. This is also officially the first motherboard that we are adding an accompanying flyover video for. The ASUS KGPE-D16 is a dual AMD Opteron motherboard sporting two G34 sockets. With the new AMD Opteron 6300 chips launched, the...