I did want to take a few moments to highlight the LSI SAS 9207-8e that we have in the labs. Although Jeff is currently working on performance numbers for the card, the LSI 9207-8e is a SAS 2308 based card. Two major trends the industry is going through at the moment are a transition to PCIe 3.0 and the...
Today we are taking a break from the usual review and guide schedule. This is an appeal to the various manufacturers out there regarding the Small Business Server that we need. As a background, ServeTheHome, despite its name, actually has more small business users than home users at this point. As a result, we get tons of e-mail around...
The IBM ServeRAID M5014 has quickly become a enthusiast favorite. Recently we did a piece on finding a great deal on IBM ServeRAID M5014's with BBUs inexpensively. On ebay there are tons of no-bracket M5014 part 46M0916-B2 for $130.30 with free shipping and tax in California. The IBM ServeRAID M5014 is great. The card is essentially a LSI MegaRAID 9260-8i with...
After months of waiting, September saw the release of the Intel Pentium G2120 and other Ivy Bridge based Core i3 and Pentium CPUs. This is significant in the marketplace because Intel sells an absolute ton of these CPUs both in the consumer desktop space, but also with low-end servers. Frankly, these days a Core i3-3220 with its onboard Intel...
Want to take a look at the Ivy Bridge generation vPro, Small Business Advantage (SBA) and Anti-Theft? Check out my latest guest post on Tom's Hardware this morning. As some may recall, Tom's Published another Intel vPro article around this time last year. This time, I looked at the incremental improvement of the newest generation of Ivy Bridge based Intel...
We get feedback that some users have issues flashing Supermicro X9SCM-F, X9SCM, X9SCL, X9SCL-F, and X9SCL+-F BIOS. This is especially important since these boards share the same BIOS file and have been around for awhile. These Supermicro motherboards that came out with Sandy Bridge need a BIOS update to support Intel Ivy Bridge based Xeon E3 CPUs. The first...
OCZ entered controversial territory with the Vertex 4 and subsequently the OCZ Agility 4 SSD. For those drives, OCZ paired Marvell SSD controllers with in-house Indilinx firmware. Although OCZ has been fairly quiet regarding exactly how the drives work, we do know a few things. First, when you write to these drives, performance drops off considerably once you consecutively write past...
In a previous article, I tested the LSI 9202-16e and pronounced it the fastest host bus adapter that money can't buy, with an AMD server pushing the card to over 5,200 MB/ second. Patrick then went on to pry one apart for your enjoyment. Noticeably missing, however, was any indication of how much throughput the card could muster on the...
What happens if you install Windows Server 2012 without the GUI features and then realize that you want to turn on the GUI? For those who are used to GUI based Windows Server administration, seeing a command line interface can be daunting. This guide will help you to go from the command line interface, using PowerShell, to installing and...
Just a quick note to the readers out there looking at a RAID controller, there is a scorching hot deal on the IBM ServeRAID M5014 RAID controller with BBU right now. I recently was looking to populate controllers for my new Windows Server 2012 machine, and noticed the IBM ServeRAID M1015 prices were much higher than a few months ago at...