Oftentimes people talk about passing a RAID controller/ HBA/ USB drive through to a guest OS in VMware ESXi (this guide is based on 4.1 and works for ESX too) using VMDirectPath I/O or disk through disk in Microsoft Hyper-V. This is especially useful when one either needs direct RAID controller/ HBA access for an operating system which is...
Having recently published the high-end home/ small business December 2010 buyer’s guide, I received a lot of feedback requesting items for the mid and low-end guides. The mid-range I define as a minimum of six drives in the system with a maximum of fourteen drives. Anything more than fourteen drives and getting a 4U storage chassis becomes cost effective....
Recently I decided I wanted to reach documents and media stored on my WHS and NexentaStor-ZFS based NASes from my Apple iPad. I have flown about 100,000 miles this year so I am oftentimes far from my NAS. While WHS would provide a solution through its sleek web interface for downloading documents to the iPad, I looked at a...
A constant question I am asked is what is a good NAS build for various usage scenarios. Based largely on my experiences with things like The Big WHS and reviewing other components for this site, I have put together two power-user builds below that provide a strong starting point for someone looking to build a 20+ drive home or...
Today I am taking a look at the G.Skill Phoenix Pro 60GB Sandforce SFF-1222 based SSD. Two things that should be clarified at the outset are that the G.Skill Phoenix Pro 60GB and the ADATA S599 64GB both have the same formatted capacity (55.8GBs) and that there is no perceivable real-world difference between the drives. The difference between the...
I have been doing a bit of testing recently with the LSI SAS 2008 based controllers such as the 9211-8i in RAID 0 with various SSDs. Recently I took eight 64GB ADATA S599 Sandforce based SSDs and placed them in RAID 0 on the LSI 9211-8i. I was expecting maximum transfer rates in excess of 2GB/s in ATTO. What...
As many people have seen, the Windows Home Server team stated that Microsoft is abandoning Drive Extender V2 in Vail. Many are crying foul and have even started to petition Microsoft to bring the new Drive Extender back which currently has approximately 1,500 signers. While most other sites are crying foul, as Drive Extender in Vail added some RAID...
ASUS is known for a fairly solid set of workstation and server motherboards. Like many vendors, ASUS uses Intel NICs on its server motherboards, and there are options ranging from IPMI 2.0 with KVM-over-IP to SAS connectivity. The ASUS P7F-E server motherboard reviewed here uses a different design methodology than the Supermicro X8SI6-F recently reviewed whereby...
One recent contact form question was regarding the alleged 660MB/s limitation on the Intel ICH10R chipset (also known as the 82801JR I/O controller), especially in conjunction with X58 based chipsets which currently represent the big iron of Intel's lineup until the LGA 2011 parts come out in Q3 or Q4 2011. When the ICH10R was released in 2008, there...
Recently, I updated the benchmark numbers on this site to include an Intel X25-M G2 80GB but alluded to having two drives free. Instead of doing a "standard" X25-M G2 80GB in RAID 0 piece, I decided to look at something I get asked quite often, Intel ICH10R/ ICH9R RAID 0 or Windows Software RAID 0 (stripe) for SSDs....