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...
After the recent article on passing controllers through to ESXi virtual machines, I did get some questions around pass-through in Hyper-V. First off, it works a bit differently in Hyper-V, but you can still expose raw disks and RAID volumes to Hyper-V virtual machines, and this does not require Intel VT-d. This is an important feature of Hyper-V because...
Norco is a server case manufacturer that is very popular with home build enthusiasts as they provide inexpensive means to house large quantities of disks in 2U, 3U, and 4U configurations. Like the DIY JBOD/ SAS Expander project posts from a few months ago (using Norco cases nonetheless Iteration 1 and Iteration 2 – A Better Solution) , Norco...
After some prodding I am starting to do a few more chassis reviews. To continue on this theme, I recently purchased a Supermicro SC933T-R760B which is a 15 bay 3.5" SAS/ SATA chassis with a triple redundant power supply. In 2010 low-cost 3U and 4U storage enclosures became popular DIY options. Those low cost enclosures like the Norco RPC-3116...
This is a simple guide to creating a VMware ESXi virtual machine for NexentaStor. Actual OS installation is very easy and will be covered in another piece. Just over a year ago I created The Big WHS on a platform of Windows Server 2008 R2 with Windows Home Server installed in Hyper-V. Simply put, this may have been the...
Stratospherix ServerControl iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad review of a management app for Windows server platforms.
I discuss SAS Expanders a lot on this site, primarily dealing with the HP SAS Expander. One option that came out in the December 2010 High-end and Mid-Range Buyer's guides was purchasing a chassis with a redundant PSU and a built-in SAS expander. Today we will be looking at one of Supermicro's SC216 series chassis, the SC216E1-R900LPB.
The SC216 series...
Norco has a reputation for providing inexpensive server rackmount cases that are oftentimes good enough for many home and small business applications. Being server cases, popular models like the RPC-4220 and RPC-4020 are built to be installed in server rooms where airflow takes precedence over noise. Traditional 90mm fans were found in the center partitions of those models. While...
After the December 2010 High-end and Mid-range Buyer’s guides, I received a lot of questions asking how redundant power supplies, and why I would recommend them over high-end enthusiast power supplies in many cases. This article will cover an overview of basic redundant power supplies, not n+1 units (that will be another piece soon).
The use cases for redundant power...
It is a well known practice that many vendors re-brand LSI RAID cards and host bus adapters (HBAs) using different firmware and re-sell them as their own. Oftentimes, re-branded cards are less expensive to acquire than their LSI counterparts making re-brands highly desirable.
It is also well known that using the initiator-target (IT) firmware mode is...