A simple guide to installing a Secure Windows 7 installation on a Windows Home Server running Hyper-V. This allows a secure Win 7 VM to be hosted on the server.
Yesterday Intel announced the Atom D425 and D525 platforms targeted for small storage servers. Both chips are 1.8GHz parts with Hyper-Threading. The Atom D425 is a single core with 512KB of cache (10w TDP) and the Atom D525 (13w TDP) being the dual core chip with 1MB of L2 cache.
The chips support both the DDR2 like the Atom D410...
Many of this site's readers have large storage requirements due to a focus on centralizing redundant storage for multiple client PCs. One common scenario is streaming video to client PCs. Personally, I use a mix of mainly micro ITX (mITX) platforms as HTPC streaming PCs. My typical configuration involves a mITX motherboard with a low power CPU, on-board GPU...
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...