Today Western Digital released a new line of drives, the Western Digital Red series, designed for network attached storage (NAS) applications. In the press release WD highlights a few key points. The new Red series hard drives are meant for 1-5 drive NAS enclosures which is a common system size for this site's users. Let's take a look at...
The OCZ Vertex 4 line, including the Vertex 4 256GB recently received another firmware update. Keen readers will remember performance was increased significantly with firmware v1.4. Today we are looking at firmware v1.5 to see if there was a similar performance update. As a quick spoiler, across benchmarks, there is an improvement with the new solid state drive firmware,...
Recently Microsoft announced that Windows Home Server will not see another version and is effectively discontinued. I actually think this makes a lot of sense, as I always felt that once the new drive extender technology was removed from Windows Home Server 2011 the product line was essentially doomed. Personally, I still have a production Windows Home Server V1...
A often asked question is whether one should use an Amazon EC2 t1.micro instance or a VMWare ESXi 5.0 server at home. For this test I decided to use the Linux 64-bit version of Geekbench by Primate Labs which is a fairly popular benchmark that does a decent job of quickly profiling the performance of environments. I had planned...
Recently we had a user question with someone trying to test a Linux virtual machine when they received a VMware ESXi 5.0 error stack with the following message: Feature vsmp not licensed, requires 16 have 8. This is a very easy thing to fix. It is happening because you cannot have 16 CPU cores assigned to one virtual machine in...
LSI has announced its new PCIe 3.0 RAID controllers that take advantage of the native PCIe 3.0 interfaces found on both the Ivy Bridge based Xeon E3 series and the Sandy Bridge-E (and Sandy Bridge-EP) based Xeon E5 series CPUs. Recently we mentioned the new LSI PCIe 3.0 6.0gbps HBA lineup which should improve speeds significantly and take advantage...
The Supermicro X9DRD-7LN4F is yet another board from Supermicro for the dual Intel Xeon E5-2600 LGA2011 range of motherboards. Supermicro has an extensive dual LGA 2011 range at this point so a user does need to take care to select the right board for their application and chassis. Along with Tyan there is an ocean of choice now in...
Gigabyte has a very interesting single LGA 2011 motherboard out supporting the Intel Xeon E5-1600 and Xeon E5-2600 series CPUs. Looking at the specs of this board, it looks to be aimed at workstation builds, with audio, and only a single GbE port. It can take a big video card and have enough PCIe lanes for a SAS controller...
Moving up the stack to the fastest Ivy Bridge Xeon Intel has to offer, today we are looking at the Intel Xeon E3-1290 V2 which is currently Intel's fastest Xeon E3 CPU coming with a 87w TDP, much higher than other Ivy Bridge CPUs but still 8w lower than the Sandy Bridge generation. Max turbo is boosted to 4.1GHz...
With all the PCI Express 3.0 capable motherboards being released lately both on the Intel Xeon E5 and Xeon E3 series sides, it's time to use all that available bandwidth. The popularity of using SSD's in RAID 0, RAID 1 and RAID 10 to give high throughput has meant that the PCIe 2.x bus got saturated with data very quickly,...