With Windows Home Server 2011 coming out in the near future many less experienced home users are looking into RAID subsystems to create larger storage pools. This is a segment where without a very solid basic understanding of what the technologies involved are, a user can make a purchasing decision detrimental to their machine's ultimate performance and data security....
With Windows Home Server 2011 and Windows Small Business Server 2011 Essentials both having recent release candidates indicating an imminent release, I thought it would be wise to take a minute to show how to setup a RAID 1 array using the Intel ICH which is found on most modern LGA 1155, LGA 1156 and LGA 1366 Intel motherboards....
The ASUS P8H67-M EVO is a very interesting board with a lot of features for the HTPC enthusiast. Based on the H67 chipset, the mATX board utilizes Intel's Sandy Bridge on-die GPU to provide video connectivity. With the P67 chip set supporting overclocking, split PCIe lines off of the GPU, but lacking the ability to utilize Intel's on-die GPU,...
Hitachi's 7K2000 drives were a favorite among users with large small business and home storage systems because the drives worked well with many RAID cards. A few drawbacks of those drives were that they were not the fastest 7,200rpm drives around, they were not the coolest running, nor the quietest. With its 3TB lineup, Hitachi introduced not just the...
This was an exciting week, and one that had many home server blogs heating up the RSS feeds with both a big Intel flaw found and Microsoft releasing much anticipated release candidates.
Intel's Cougar Point- Sandy Bridge Recall
Intel announced this week that it is financially bracing for a $1 billion USD recall ($300M in lost revenue, $700M to repair and...
Microsoft's Windows Home Server Vail platform has had a rough development cycle. First cheered for the public beta with a slew of new media features such as on-the-fly transcoding, the euphoria did not last. This fall, Microsoft announced that the popular and updated Drive Extender V2 technology would no longer be a part of the Vail platform. Drive Extender...
Since July 2010 the ServeTheHome.com has more than doubled the amount of content and traffic. As a result, I have had to take building content plans further out than a week or two just to make sure I have things to review or topics to write about. My primary driver for creating this content is to help small businesses...
Internal hard drives usually carry a manufacturer’s warranty, commonly three years. Personally, I believe that after three years, one wants to replace drives due to the fact that failures start to occur at a greater rate after three years. One other way to source internal drives for the average consumer is to purchase an external drive and to liberate...
Microsoft Hyper-V, which is a very common virtualization platform for Windows based servers especially with the Windows Server 2008 R2 role, utilizes a different method of networking virtual machines than Microsoft’s VirtualPC (or XP mode on Windows 7 operating systems.) With VirtualPC the VMs hardware calls are sent to the host operating system, and then to the underlying hardware....
Intel announced today that it has discovered a flaw in the Sandy Bridge desktop chip sets that are part of the Cougar Point family, and I am looking for a workaround.
Details of the flaw were not given, other than to say that SATA performance with hard drives and DVD drives would degrade over time. Intel also announced that a...