As a follow-on to the Supermicro X8SIL-F review, I had some interest in seeing power consumption figures for the CPU's involved. I have already discussed the Intel Core i3-530's low idle power consumption and relatively low maximum power consumption extensively. As I have a habit of doing, I decided to use an Intel Xeon X3340 in the new server...
As a quick update to the previous AdminiMe 2010 review, ASoft released an update to its popular AdminiMe 2010 Add-in.
It appears as though ASoft does take feedback very seriously as a bug/ quirky feature noted in the initial AdminiMe review, where drives were not displayed in completely sequential order if more than 10 drives are present has been corrected.
You...
After completing the first DAS/ SAS Expander JBOD enclosure project I realized that there was a major area of improvement. Using less than 30% of a large 4U case's volume for useful purposes seemed like the key area to improve upon. As I was completing that build I soon realized that I wanted a secondary server to be able...
The Big WHS was originally supposed to house approximately 30TB of storage when the plans were first detailed on an Excel spreadsheet BOM in December 2009. This was a big upgrade to my first DIY Windows Home Server box that had well under 20TB. About five months later, the storage capacity has crested 60TB, with further room to expand....
To update to my review of the Supermicro X8SIL-F, I took some Kill-A-Watt power consumption numbers with the Supermicro X8SIL-F to answer a few questions regarding power consumption with real server hardware compared to consumer-level hardware. Below I am focusing on idle power consumption as with the Intel Core i3-530, Xeon X3440, and other LGA 1156 CPUs the CPU...
The Supermicro X8SIL-F motherboard is an excellent board for home and small business servers. When building a file server built upon Windows Home Server (V1 or V2 Vail) or another open source NAS project such as FreeNAS, Openfiler, EON ZFS storage, the Supermicro has a feature set that differentiates itself from both AMD and Intel based consumer-level motherboards. Compatibility...
Oftentimes, users running file servers such as Windows 2008 Server R2, Windows Home Server, Linux variants (including Openfiler), OpenSolaris, FreeBSD (including FreeNAS), and so forth will require more storage than their server can physically store. One option is to add more servers to the SAN. Another option is to add more storage to an existing server. Adding a second (or...
The Supermicro X8SIL-F mATX motherboard is becoming a favorite for home servers, especially those built upon Core i3's and Core i5's because it provides lots of expandability in a small form factor, and has IPMI 2.0. The Supermicro X8SIL-F's supported processors can easily handle a network attached storage (NAS) virtual machine as well as additional virtual machines for other...
As I mentioned in the previous post on the compatibility issue, I had to RMA my Supermicro X8SIL-F (mATX LGA 1156 server board with IPMI 2.0 and dual Intel gigabit NICs) last week because it was version 1.01 PCB instead of v1.02. The difference being support for Clarkdale CPU's.
Just to give an idea of why Supermicro's support is so...
I have been using Adaptec products for over a decade, and have generally been a fan (with a few exceptions over the years). My first Windows Home Server was based upon an Adaptec 31605 RAID controller. Today, PMC-Sierra acquired Adaptec's channel storage business, including their RAID business for $34m USD in cash.
This is probably a sign of things to...