When I get asked what is the best PCIe x1 Gigabit Ethernet adapter today, I quickly answer the Intel Gigabit CT Desktop adapter without hesitation. Although it may seem disingenuous to many to recommend a desktop adapter for servers, I have about a half-dozen of these adapters and they have become my go-to choice whenever I see an open...
Today we are looking at the ASUS P8B WS motherboard for Intel's E3-1200 series Xeon CPUs. Based on the C206 chipset, the P8B WS is able to utilize the Xeon CPUs with a five as the last number (e.g. Xeon E3-1235) and take advantage of Intel's onboard GPU. By enabling the Sandy Bridge graphics engine, the ASUS P8B WS...
This week saw research on the sub-$10,000 USD NAS market almost doubling in size from 2009 to 2010. Hitachi announces a cloud storage system with 3GB of free storage. Adaptec's 6-series RAID controllers get a design win.
Sub-$10K NAS Market Spikes According to Infonetics Research
Market research firm Infonetics Research this week released excerpts from its new quarterly NAS Appliance market...
After reviewing the Hitachi 5K3000 2TB SilentSpin drive earlier this year, questions have steadily trickled in around the 3TB version. One thing that was consistent in comments was a perception that the Hitachi 5K3000 3TB drive runs slower than the 2TB version. Today we look at the 3TB model's benchmarks to see what kind of performance the drive offers.
Test...
Although Intel has been trying to obsolete the PCI bus in recent times with the Sandy Bridge desktop platforms not supporting the PCI bus natively, there are still an absolute ton of PCI slots available in the installed base and adding a PCI Gigabit Ethernet adapter is a very common use these days.
Two important notes about the Intel Pro/1000...
The Bromolow platform with Sandy Bridge E3 Xeons and C200 series chipsets provides a very low-power platform for small business and home servers. Starting with the new Intel Xeon E3-1230, users get both low power consumption as well as four cores and eight threads when combined with a motherboard, such as the ASUS P8B-X, yields a total cost of...
Fusion-io hits the street with a much anticipated initial public offering (IPO), Hitachi GST posts higher hard drive unit sales but lower revenue, Folding@Home's new BIG work units and ServeTheHome's second anniversary all made news this week.
Fusion-io's IPO a Success
On Thursday 9 June 2010 Fusion-io, a company I follow, had its initial public offering on the NYSE. The stock...
Many users have been finding themselves with brand new Sandy Bridge motherboards and the hard drive industry's now affordable 3TB drives only to see that the new drive only has 746GB available in even 64-bit Windows. I receive questions about why this happens on Hitachi, Western Digital, Seagate, and Samsung drives on a regular basis so I think this...
One question I have been getting a lot lately has been whether or not I think Apple's iCloud is going to be the end to the SMB/ Home storage server market. After all, many users do store their music, pictures, contacts and documents and etc. are often stored on network attached storage (NAS) devices. One thing users are constantly...
Today marks the second anniversary of ServeTheHome.com which was started on June 8, 2009. To mark the occasion here are some interesting facts:
1. During June 2009 ServeTheHome.com had 92 visitors. That is well under the average number of visitors the site receives each hour at this point.
2. On 8 June 2009 the first STH benchmark was posted of two...