The Western Digital WD Red is a hot topic in the NAS community at the moment as the small NAS market now has a drive specifically targeted at the market for the first time. Up until now Western Digital have separated their hard drive lines into three; Blue for consumer drives, Green for low-power drives and Black for performance....
One question asked frequently on this site is how can low-cost Infiniband host channel adapters (HCA) be used to achieve high data transfer speeds between workstations, servers and storage. Unlike standard 10/100/1000/10000 Ethernet connections, Infiniband setup is a bit more complicated and does not work out of the box. To the inexperienced user, setting up Infiniband can either seem daunting...
One very important aspect to the ESXi 5 All-in-One systems that have become very popular is getting the memory mix correct. Generally an OpenSolaris derived OS is used for storage as it provides both ZFS as well as native iSCSI to provide other virtual machines, and other network devices with fast, reliable and redundant storage. With that being said, OpenIndiana...
Today the ASRock Extreme11 appeared on the company's website. This is the same X79 Extreme11 that we previewed on this site months ago. This looks, on paper, to be the top LGA2011 workstation motherboard for Intel Xeon E5-1600 and Intel Xeon E5-2600 CPUs. The motherboard looks packed full with chips, sockets and heatsinks. So much so that I've not...
The Samsung 830 256GB SSD is a top pick in this SSD generation given Samsung's reputation for quality. One can find Samsung SSD offerings inside several OEMs such as Apple and HP so we know the level of testing the controllers and firmware are put through exceed that of small SSD companies. Recently SSD prices have come down a...
Gigabyte recently released new barebones systems for the new Intel Xeon E5-2400 and Intel Xeon E5-2600 series CPUs. Barebones systems are popular with resellers and end users because the chassis, motherboard, and power supplies are generally optimized for the package. Further, cabling generally comes pre-installed so usually taking a barebones system to a production ready system can be as...
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...