As many industry observers expected, the two major pending storage deals, Western Digital – Hitachi and Seagate – Samsung are attracting antitrust scrutiny. Regulators in the US are looking at the deals, and now the European Union is looking into the industry consolidation as reported this week.
Regulators are looking at the deals because the combined market share of...
A few bits of this week's interesting storage news and an update on ServeTheHome including a FTC request in the Seagate-Samsung deal, new Xeon motherboards from Gigabyte, a new USB NAS solution from Addonics, and Patrick running SoCal Tough Mudder this weekend!
FTC Asks Seagate for Additional Information on Samsung Acquisition
As a lot of people expected, the FTC made a...
One area where Newegg has had a poor reputation over the past few years has been hard drive packaging. Recently I have picked up a few OEM Hitachi (bulk) drives from NewEgg and have seen first-hand the new packaging. Since Internet reviews seemingly last a lifetime, I thought it was important to provide a point of view regarding Newegg...
A week ago SanDisk announced a $327 million deal to acquire Pliant Technology, I believe this is only the first step in SanDisk's strategy. SanDisk is already well known as a top tier supplier of NAND based memory products including Secure Digital cards, compact flash, and USB memory. Although SanDisk's brand does carry a premium in the marketplace, the...
With the sheer number of CPUs and platforms I test for ServeTheHome.com I have been keeping my own records on performance and scaling. Various benchmarks yield very different results under Windows and Linux, but also yield different scaling based on core counts and clock speed. It turns out that Stanford's Folding@Home client, when proper optimizations have been...
Dual AMD Socket G34 motherboards offer a lot of expandability and high core counts at competitive prices and the Supermicro H8DG6-F is no exception. With AMD's current Opteron 6100 series Magny-cours socket G34 chips one can pack from eight to twenty-four cores on a dual socket motherboard at a reasonable price. With AMD's upcoming Interlagos series of Bulldozer based...
This weekend I got a call from a local business that produces highlight reels from video game footage. Admittedly, I am not a big gamer (my PS3 was purchased at launch and has played games for less than four hours over the years), but I did think that this would be an interesting opportunity to do some troubleshooting over...
Over the past few months I have looked at a number of different CPUs including the Intel Atom Pineview D510 platform, the AMD Brazos E-350 platform, and a number of Xeon E3 series CPUs like the Xeon E3-1230. At the same time I have been playing with those CPUs and a lot of previous generation hardware with Microsoft Small...
This week saw some very interesting news with LSI announcing new milestones, EMC and NetApp jumping into big data analytics, Intel announcing the Z68 chip set and 22nm Atom, and Gluster announcing a bare metal appliance.
EMC and NetApp do Hadoop!
EMC this week was very cloud heavy in its announcements. Shortly after NetApp announced the completion of its purchase...
One question I get weekly is whether or not one should use Absolute or Relative mouse in the AMI MegaRAC-based IPMI 2.0 KVM-over-IP solutions. The answer is relatively simple: it depends.
For many users it is frustrating that AMI has not traditionally labeled the two options with appropriate use cases on the UI. Recently I started testing the Supermicro H8DG6-F...