ServeTheHome.com

I arrived to work on the third day of 2012 only to find that half of the people in this vast room with seemingly well over 150 employees and contractors had managed to catch some sort of cold, flu or other reason to keep the coffers of Vick’s and Robitussin filled to the brim. It occurred to me that something is clearly amiss as this is the Silicon Valley, the hotspot of technology. In the battle of iOS v. Android, the winner and loser will be only a few miles away from each other on Highway 85. To my surprise, here I am, among dozens of folks that should otherwise be at home, nursing illness but are instead here. Continue Reading

Seagate followed, and in many ways out-did Western Digital in slashing warranties, even on their nearline storage disks. This shouldn’t be a surprise since Western Digital cut its warranties last week and STH noted it is likely Seagate would follow suit. Continue Reading

For those that have not seen, The Register is reporting that Western Digital is cutting warranties on its Caviar (desktop 3.5″) and Scorpio (notebook 2.5″) Green and Blue drives from the industry standard (on consumer drives) 3 years to 2 years. Continue Reading

As some saw over the past week or so, ServeTheHome moved fully to the Amazon.com cloud platform. The forums and much of the back-end still runs on the legacy platform, but the front-end main site is all hosted on Amazon’s servers. I have been fairly unhappy with the up-time and performance of the old host so this should be a major upgrade that allows the site to scale for quite awhile. Continue Reading

When it comes to purchasing business class storage, a lot of the components and builds featured on ServeTheHome scale to $6,000+, but IT professionals often look to companies like EMC, NetApp, Dell, HP and IBM for storage systems in the 100-1,000 user segment. While ServeTheHome oftentimes uses components similar or identical to storage vendor’s systems (Compellent’s systems when first integrated with Dell still used Supermicro components and chassis as an example), the software stack of large storage vendors is certainly better. Let’s look at what NetApp did this week. Continue Reading

I generally tell folks to purchase the hard drive capacity they need for data, redundancy and hot spares taking into account their storage growth over the next 12-18 months. In some situations, such as when one is working with large RAID 6 arrays or ZFS-based systems, you need to carefully plan how and when you add capacity to storage systems. Continue Reading

For those that did not see the article this morning, my Intel vPro article looking at the last three generations of Intel vPro technology went live on Tom’s Hardware this morning. See Intel vPro: Three Generations of Remote Management! One of the big reasons I did this piece was to learn the ins and outs of working with vPro as opposed to IPMI 2.0-based solutions. I have a ton of users that consistently ask whether or not a Q57 or Q67 based board, with its KVM-over-IP is worthwhile for a home user or to use as a home server platform. Continue Reading

As some may have seen over the past few weeks, ServeTheHome has gotten relatively hammered. As a result, the site which was running perfectly well in June 2011 was seeing stability issues in late August. I decided to take the opportunity to see if I could speed things up a bit.

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With Seagate’s recent launch of their 4TB drive, it is time to look at the cost per GB on the different drives. To be clear, this is still a somewhat futile exercise since there is one 4TB model shipping, and that 4TB model is only available in an external format. It is still a somewhat interesting exercise to look at 1TB to 3TB drives at this point. Continue Reading

AMD finally announced that it is shipping its Bulldozer-based Interlagos CPUs to vendors through a press release. One may have missed the short press release, especially given that AMD still only lists the Opteron 6100 series Magny-cours chips on their product page. It appears as though the chips are shipping only to OEMs (such as Cray) and other partners right now, but they will be trickling down to the retail market sometime in October. Continue Reading