The Corsair Force Series 3 120GB drive combines a Sandforce 2200 series controller alongside asynchronous NAND memory to provide a lot of performance at a relatively low cost. It should be noted that the earlier drives, specifically those starting with serial numbers before 1123 were recalled on June 7, 2011 due to firmware issues. Unfortunately, SSDs from all manufacturers,...
This is a super quick note of a conversation I heard at a local Silicon Valley food spot this weekend. From what I overheard it appears that, at least for the 4P AMD Interlagos motherboards, some vendors will re-spin their PCBs to allow for better memory and HT 3 traces to the CPUs. Rumor has it that the higher...
One of the most popular motherboard reviews on STH of the Xeon 3400 series generation was the Supermicro X8SIL-F. It was a micro ATX (mATX) motherboard with some of the mainstay server board features such as dual Intel 82574L Gigabit NICs and IPMI 2.0. Looking forward to this generation, Supermicro has a spiritual successor in the X9SCM-F which has...
For those that are accustomed to IPMI 2.0 for their servers, with KVM-over-IP and the ability to remotely reboot a PC, Intel's vPro platform provides some similar functionality. I have been working with vPro components quite a bit over the past few weeks and decided to try using my Apple iPad to reboot the machine.Admittedly, I am the kind...
As some readers know, a big reason for the slow content on the site is that I am busy writing a big piece on Intel vPro technology for a very big technology review site. As part of this, one thing I realized is that Intel's current model of offering it only with specific chip sets and its mid to...
One project that inspired some of my own work has been the Backblaze storage pod v1 which held 67TB in a custom 45 drive 4U chassis. It was essentially a lower cost and lower performance Sun Thumper that utilized commodity parts to achieve high storage densities at a very low cost per TB (or PB since that is the...
LSI has been fairly dominant in the 6.0gbps HBA/ RAID 0/1/10 market for quite a while now. Early market entry, low cost cards, and a myriad of OEM wins have made the SAS 2008/ SAS 2108 architectures the de-facto standard for use with software RAID or as RAID 0/1/10 devices. Adaptec paper launched their 6 series controllers which support...
It is no secret that Netflix is a hugely popular streaming and DVD rental service. When it was announced that Netflix was decoupling the streaming and DVD-by-mail services and that one would pay more for the former level of service, both colleagues sitting next to me that just received raises cancelled their subscriptions to Netflix. I have a feeling...
It is no secret that the LSI 1068e controller was one of, if not the most widely supported SAS controllers around but 3.0gbps serial interconnects have given way to 6.0gbps interconnects. Unlike the LSI 1068e based parts, support for things like 3TB drives is much better on 6.0gbps parts to the point where I have yet to encounter an...
The HP Smart Array P411 is a fairly inexpensive 6.0gbps SAS 2 and SATA III controller. To enhance performance, the HP Smart Array P411 has a variety of cache options available. This is a quick guide installing a 512MB DRAM plus BBU kit to the controller. A similar setup must be used in order to do things like flash...