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...
One question often asked is what type of connector is needed, or what do all of these connectors mean. I thought that it may benefit my readers to have a quick-and-easy reference to the main SAS and SATA connector types. Some of the below images did get cut-off when being downsized so one may get additional detail by clicking...
At the request of some users, I am putting together a few bits of storage news from the past week. If the response is positive, I may make this a weekly Friday digest.
OCZ Z-Drive R3 PCIe SSD Solution For Enterprises and OEMs
OCZ Technology, a leader in providing 2.5", 3.5", and PCIe SSDs announced the Z-Drive R3 PCI-Express SSD...
While visiting a local retailer I saw a Supermicro SC-731i-300B on the shelf during the same visit that I was purchasing the Core i7-2600K and ASUS P8H67-M EVO that were used in the Sandy Bridge and H67 chip set for the home server review. It is one of those items that came close to making the cut for the...
Recently creating a VMware ESXi virtual machine for NexentaStor was covered in a quick how-to guide. The next logical piece of the puzzle is this guide to getting NexentaStor installed in the virtual machine. There are, of course variations to the installation, so this guide will not cover every variation out there, but it should be more than sufficient...
A lot has been made of the new Intel Sandy Bridge parts. For HTPC's they are really great CPUs as they offer low power consumption, in line with Clarkdale, and have a slew of new features. Since there has been a lot of discussion regarding the new CPUs already in terms of overclock ability and general performance, I am...