Supermicro contacted me about reviewing their SC842TQ-665B chassis a few weeks ago and I thought it would be a good departure from the pure storage chassis. Sometimes, a large 4U 20-24 3.5" bay enclosure is unnecessary. With today's 3.5" disk prices, adding a 4TB usable RAID 6 array plus hot spare and a few SSDs for caching in ZFS...
As part of its Q1'11 CPU roll-out, Sandy Bridge was perhaps Intel's biggest announcement. Intel also released the E5603, E5606, and E5607 CPUs which are quad core, non-Hyper-Threading parts meant for dual processor (DP) servers. I decided to look at the E5606 CPU as a successor to the E5506 previous generation (45nm) CPU and was very surprised with the...
Up for benchmarking today is the Intel Xeon E3-1280 Sandy Bridge based Xeon processor. Interestingly enough, this is the highest stock clocked Sandy Bridge CPU available today. After looking at both the Xeon E3-1220 and Xeon E3-1230 recently I decided to purchase a Xeon E3-1280, the fastest Sandy Bridge CPU (Xeon or otherwise) available to date, just out of...
This week was full of M&A news, but also saw some new features on ServeTheHome. Also, Fusion-io and Supermicro teamed up to create an IOPS powerhouse.
ServeTheHome's Forums Get New Resources
Forum moderator odditory has added a few great FAQs/ Wikis on the ServeTheHome.com forums this week. First is the PMC Sierra based HP SAS Expander FAQ/ Wiki which is a...
On tap for today is benchmarking the Xeon W3550 LGA 1366 UP server CPU. Recently I have been looking at the new Sandy Bridge Xeon E3-1220 and Xeon E3-1230 CPUs. Most comparisons have come in the form of the new Sandy Bridge Xeons to the Lynnfield based Xeon X3440 and Xeon X3460 CPUs. I have received numerous comments requesting...
After today's markets' close NetApp announced the purchase of LSI's Engenio External Storage Systems Business for $480million in cash.The motivation behind this is that NetApp needed a high speed solution primarily for very high throughput (both bandwidth and IOPS) applications such as multi-stream video capture and playback as well as high-performance computing (HPC) applications. Also, NetApp 's V-series is...
Today, the vast majority of memory used by desktops, notebooks, and mobile devices is unbuffered non-ECC (Error Checking and Correction) DRAM. In fact, unless one is running an Intel or AMD CPU that can support ECC memory unbuffered ECC DRAM is the only choice for most users. Intel Xeons, for example, support ECC memory, while even the new Core...
The Supermicro X8DTH-6F motherboard is a substantial dual processor (DP) motherboard loaded with on board features and expansion possibilities. Users looking for a low-end server, or a simple 20 drive system accessed over a single Gigabit Ethernet port should avert their eyes because this board is about as feature packed as they come. For those looking to build a...
As someone who worked on the Seagate-Maxtor merger a few years ago, I was a bit worried to see this morning the news that Western Digital bought Hitachi GST for $4.3 billion. See the press release here.
My basic thoughts are that if Western Digital uses Hitachi technology, this is a win for consumers. If it uses a similar strategy...
After publishing the first Sandy Bridge Xeon review of the E3-1220 a big question remained, what would the performance of hyper-threaded versions of the new Intel Xeon E3 series be like, including the Intel Xeon E3-1230? Today, we look at the next step faster Intel Xeon E3 CPU. The basic enhancements are the addition of Hyper-Threading and a 100MHz...