Oftentimes those building their own small business and home storage servers are looking to save considerable amounts of money. In the process, users oftentimes look to the lowest cost motherboard they can find, with the wisdom that add-in cards can get the features that they want. On the other end of the spectrum are server motherboards like the Supermicro...
Over the weekend I experienced an oddly inaccessible network share on a Windows Home Server instance running in Hyper-V using Windows Server 2008 R2. Unfortunately I was not at my desk at the time but did have 3G access and a laptop. As I am a big proponent of KVM-over-IP and remote power cycle features of many server boards,...
One of the most annoying things in SSDs these days is the fact that virtually every manufacturer uses mail-in rebates to make their SSDs appear more affordable. The ADATA S599 64GB is based on the Sandforce SF-1222 controller like many other popular Sandforce consumer drives such as the OCZ Agility 2 and OCZ Vertex 2, Corsair Force, Patriot Inferno,...
This preview release has all the functionality of the first preview (0.1.7-preview), but in addition has the following changes:
The Mesa ZFS Web Interface/ ZFSguru benchmark has been recently updated since my last post on the Mesa ZFS Web Interface 0.1.7-Preview. Some of the highlight changes are support for the Supermicro AOC-SAT2-MV8 host bus adapter, a SMART monitoring interface, and...
The question of whether or not one can mix 7,200rpm hard drives with 5,400rpm (5,900rpm or other speed) "green" drives in RAID is one that I get asked constantly. My general advice is to not do it. While testing the Supermicro X8SI6-F and Supermicro X8SIL-F with a LSI 9211-8i (essentially making the setups very similar) I ran some Windows...
Following theIntel SASUC8I and LSI SAS3081E-R 1068e Based RAID Controller Review which featured a LSI 1068e based Intel SASUC8I I have started to take a look at LSI SAS 2008 based controllers. One such controller I have been working with is based on the Supermicro X8SI6-F which has an onboard LSI SAS 2008 8-port SAS2 controller. This onboard controller is...
The ability to remotely monitor servers utilizing IPMI 2.0 is a key differentiator between server grade hardware and consumer hardware. Supermicro's IPMIview software is an often overlooked piece of software that makes managing multiple servers remotely a simple task. While there is a simple web interface that Supermicro uses on many of its boards, the IPMI 2.0 features, including...
I often get questions regarding good ways to stress test home servers, especially new drives. As part of the in-development FreeBSD 8.x based Mesa ZFS Web Interface, sub.mesa has released 0.1.7-preview of the interface with a built-in benchmark that runs for 12+ hours on many systems. Running this a few times on a new build is probably a good...
Western Digital announced new 2.5TB and 3TB Green Series drives at $189.99 and $239.99. These drives are an interesting proposition for large home server users that are not running Windows Home Server V1.
Unlike Intel, AMD produces a full line of triple core processors including the AMD Athlon II X3 445 3.1GHz that will be reviewed here today. STH has already reviewed the single core Sempron 140, the dual core Athlon II X2 260 Regor, and the quad core Athlon II X4 640 Propus so hopefully this helps fill in the performance...