Although I am a big Intel CPU fan right now, I do run AMD systems also. Case and point, this weekend I bought an AMD Phenom II x4 955 + USB 3.0 and SATA 3 motherboard, and I built an AMD Sempron 140 based Windows Home Server (WHS). I decided to do a few benchmarks so that I could...
Every so often a cool plug-in comes along that is a must have. I saw AdminiMe from ASoft recently on sale for $6 as a special and decided to give it a try. The plug-in is a fairly basic monitoring program which lets you see basic health stats of your Windows Home Server (WHS), send automated notifications when something goes awry,...
In previous articles we have shown how to set up a basic Hyper-V virtual machine that works with FreeBSD and FreeNAS as well as how to configure the Hyper-V VM and boot FreeNAS in it. The next step of course is to install FreeNAS to a vhd, so it no longer needs to run off of the LiveCD. This...
To install FreeNAS in a Hyper-V virtual machine one needs to do some configuration of the virtual machine, just as one would with a physical machine. Allocating hardware resources is much easier in Hyper-V versus physical machines because you can do it remotely through screens instead of physically taking a box offline and installing hardware. This guide will show...
As many have read, I have been trying different NAS solutions on the Big Windows Home Server. This guide will show the base procedures for installing open-source NAS/ SAN appliances such as FreeNAS, OpenFiler, Ubuntu (and other Linux distros), OpenSolaris (and variants such as CentOS) into a Hyper-V VM.
For this guide, I will be using screenshots from the Hyper-V manager...
I got a note asking to update my original benchmark for the Patriot PS-100 32GB with results from the new Patriot PS-100 Firmware v2.008. Performance is said to be better and it is!
Update 6 June 2010: New Patriot PS-100 32GB Firmware v3.000 benchmarks are up.
The specs of the update are:
Firmware update #2.008
Firmware v2.006 doesn't support Active Protection feature in...
Shortly after posting my last benchmarks on the dual OCZ Vertex 120GB in Raid 0 setup, I received an e-mail to try the new Intel Rapid Storage Technology (RST) 9.6.0.1014 drivers, which were supposed to enable TRIM in raid. These new drivers were released, taken down, then re-released in March 2010. The big improvement was supposed to be TRIM is...
Here are bencmarks of the OCZ Vertex 120GB in Raid 0 with version 1.5 (v1.5) firmware. Also included is a note about OCZ's RMA Process
Now that the Big WHS is stable, and I have a bit more storage capacity than I need, I decided that Windows Home Server running virtualized in a Hyper-V virtual machine is good, but I wanted to test out some of the free WHS alternatives. A quck listing of the NAS operating systems installed on the current box shows is:
Microsoft Windows...
I had heard rumors of 32 drives being the limit, so I figured, why not? I had more than 32 1.5TB and 2TB disks in hot swap bays, and could easily handle the connectivity. Plus, since I am booting the new WHS from a VHD, I knew that WHS could mount VHD's meaning I could somewhat quickly test 32+...