Building a dual processor (DP) server is not a tough task, but it does have a few considerations for anyone looking to build one from scratch. I was building a DP platform for a few reviews and decided to take the opportunity to take some pictures. This is a quick build guide to a dual Xeon system with three...
Corsair’s Performance 3 series is a newer SATA III 6.0gbps drive that offers quite a bit of performance utilizing a Marvell controller. Marvell has been making a splash lately on SSD controllers. The Micron C300 held the performance crown for almost a year as its competitors were capped by SATA II bandwidth constraints. Today we will look at the...
One important storage principle that many people forget is that RAID is not a backup solution, it is a method of achieving performance targets, redundancy, and up-time. Users backup their PCs to their local servers, but often forget to backup server data off-site. This is especially concerning for any data using the local server as primary storage. One option...
The much anticipated and already announced Sandy Bridge Xeons were supposed to follow desktop and notebook counterparts in short order, however it seems like everything Sandy Bridge is on hold while Intel rectifies Cougar Point. However, the new Sandy Bridge Xeons are here! Today attention is on the Xeon E3-1220 which is a 3.1ghz quad core without Hyper-Threading or...
This week had a few interesting storage related items worthy of the digest from ATTO, Corsair, Apple/Intel, Acer and a public service announcement about subscribing to ServeTheHome.com's RSS feeds. The next few weeks should be somewhat more exciting review wise here so updating your RSS feed may be worthwhile.
ATTO Released ExpressSAS v2.10
ATTO, the maker of both RAID cards...
One of the biggest new features in Service Pack 1 for Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V users is the new Dynamic Memory functionality. Instead of partitioning physical memory into separate silos for each virtual machine, Dynamic Memory basically allows the Hyper-V hypervisor to allocate a pool of memory to be used for various virtual machines and then allocate...
It has been a long time since I have posted about The Big WHS. At the last update in May 2010, the machine occupied 8U using two 4U enclosures, and was topping 60TB of raw storage capacity. Since then there have been quite a few developments that I thought I would write about.
The current hardware list is as follows:
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A commonly asked question is what makes up a good RAID controller. There are many purveyors of RAID cards out there that will sell a FakeRAID solution supporting RAID 5 or RAID 6 for a premium.
The RAID Controller
Here one generally looks for a RAID on Chip controller (RoC). While RAID 0, 1, and 10 are fairly easy for a...
Many users are familiar with Windows networking and browsing shared folders over a local network. For constantly accessed shared folders, a simple way of accessing the same folder immediately is to simply create a shortcut. The other, and potentially better way to regularly access information from a server is to map the shared folder as a network drive. When...
This week I had a few tidbits that looked interesting related to the new C200 series chip sets for the new Xeons, iSuppli NAND consumption, Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1 released to MSDN and Technet subscribers.
I am on a plane from California to London at the moment, so if any exciting news happens today, I will likely...