At Intel Developers Forum (IDF) in Beijing Intel announced its new Centerton Atom SoC to combat the looming threat of ARM architectures in for cloud applications. HP, Dell and others have already announced plans to offer ARM-based server CPUs really targeting the cloud market. While some of STH's readers may wonder why Intel is worrying about the chip designer best...
Just released from ASUS is the high-end workstation dual LGA2011 Z9PE-D8 WS motherboard. When you look at the board you can't help but notice 7x PCIe 16x slots, plenty of room for expansion on this board. It is clearly a direct competitor to the EVGA SR-X Classified. Dual Intel 82574L 1GbE ports, make it an ideal choice for VMware ESXi or a...
Intel recently posted an article outlining the ECC schemes found in its Ethernet controllers. For those that do not know, Intel Ethernet controllers have small (tens of KB usually) send/ receive buffers that help performance but are another point in the memory chain. After posting the RAID Reliability Anthology Part 1 I was contacted by a few folks that...
Today we have another piece by Pieter Schaar, the author of our great LSI series. Pieter is perhaps best known as the one behind laptopvideo2go.com. He has been a regular contributor in the STH forums and has been detailing his learning, specifically in the area of LSI controllers in the forums and in series such as his IBM M1015 series pieces. Today Pieter is branching out...
In the next installment of the CPU cooler roundup, we are taking a look at the Corsair Air Series A70 which is an interesting offering that Corsair does not officially list as a compatible LGA2011 cooler, but it does work. The big question is whether or not a big tower cooler, like the Corsair A70 is a worthwhile investment...
Last week we reviewed the Thermaltake MAX-1542 hotswap enclosure that puts four 2.5" hot swap drive bays into a single 5.25" drive slot. This week, we are looking at Thermaltake's higher-density product, the Thermaltake MAX-1562 6x 2.5" in 1x 5.25" bay hot swap RAID enclosure for SSDs. This is clearly not a product we would have seen in the 15K rpm...
After the initial review of the Dell/ Silicom PEG6I six port Gigabit Ethernet adapter came up, where I showed that a simple search could yield six Intel Gigabit Ethernet ports on one card for under $125 (see here for the PEG6I eBay search), I turned to look at the PEG6I's VMware ESXi 5.0 compatibility which was good. I did want to take the...
ASRock has announced a monster board the ASRock X79 Extreme11 and are really pulling out all stops with this motherboard. This could be of interest to those requiring a workstation board that is a crossover with server board features. The main feature that caught my eye is the onboard dual core LSI SAS 2308 SAS 2 /SATA III controller...
Last week we launched the ServeTheHome RAID Calculator and it has been quite a success and we received a bunch of feedback on it. This week we have incorporated much of that feedback and turned the RAID Calculator into a much more flexible tool. There is still much work to be done, but this version incorporates much of the...
Today we are taking a look at the Corsair Hydro Series H100 liquid cooling solutions specifically in the context of servers and workstations. I opined in the earlier Corsair Hydro Series H80 review about my thoughts on why the LGA 2011 platform is ideal for testing higher-end coolers so I will defer to that piece for the explanation. Let's...