All hard drives will eventually fail. Some earlier than others. As some readers may remember, The Big WHS lost three of eight new Western Digital Green 1.5TB drives earlier this year within a three month span, leading me to procure more and more Hitachi 2TB 7200rpm drives. Recently, I experienced my first Hitachi drive failure when a six month...
Microsoft Windows Vista and Windows 7 contain a benchmark utility called the Windows System Assessment Tool (WinSAT). The Windows Experience Index is more or less a GUI version of the WinSAT scores that provides the user with a simple way to run the test, and see a summary of the results. With Windows Home Server V2 Codename VAIL right...
Although Intel's Atom CPUs have made a splash in the mini ITX space, many users prefer the small form factor yet want more computing power than the Atom can muster. In response to this need, motherboard manufacturers have started to build standard socket motherboards in small form factors such as mITX.
Over the past decade, features such as video, audio,...
As one would gather from my previous Intel Atom D510 and NM10 post, I am not the biggest fan of the current D510 Atom platform with NM10 chipset. ZOTAC, to its credit, did take a rather mediocre platform and build a solid board around it. The most probable use case is a streaming media HTPC (non h.264) to a legacy 720p display. The nice thing about the ZOTAC offering is that it has quite a few expansion options for a D510/ NM10 based system, and it is ready to go out of the box.
Installing EON ZFS Storage, an OpenSolaris derivative for testing purposes in an Oracle VirtualBox VM is an easy task. This installation how to assumes that one has already installed VirtualBox, setup an OpenSolaris virtual machine, and booted from the EON ZFS Storage live CD.
The two relevant guides if you have not done so are:
How to Install Oracle VirtualBox (for...
Out with the old and in with the new, but worse platform. I have been wondering about the Intel Atom D510 performance for quite a while now alongside the NM10 chipset. It is essentially Intel’s upgrade to the venerable dual-core Intel Atom N330. With the consolidation of features to the D510 and NM10 Intel was able to get rid...
As was mentioned in my previous article, I am a big fan of using VirtualBox virtualization on my Windows 7 x64 desktop to sandbox different storage configurations, especially with ZFS capable operating systems like FreeNAS and OpenSolaris. While Microsoft's Virtual PC works well to virtualize Windows XP instances on the desktop, it lacks the feature set of a more...
Although I use Hyper-V virtualization for all of my current Windows Home Server, Windows Server 2008 R2, and other test environments, Hyper-V still does a poor job at virtualizing other environments like FreeBSD, OpenSolaris, and Linux (to some degree). Testing new Windows instances is very simple with Hyper-V, however for those wanting to test out ZFS prior to building...
After the Intel Xeon X3440 review, I wanted to see the difference between the X3440 and the Intel Core i7-860. Of course, I could have just purchased a Core i7-860, but instead I decided to get an Intel Xeon X3460 because it is essentially the same CPU, just with ECC support. For all intents and purposes, the Intel Xeon...
This video tutorial will show you how to install the Windows Home Server Connector Software without using the CD/DVD. As netbooks, usually without optical drives, flood the market, this is often the easiest way to install the connector software. For those using a motherboard such as the Supermicro X8SIL-F or Supermicro X8ST3-F, with remote ISO image mounting at the...