ServeTheHome.com

This week saw research on the sub-$10,000 USD NAS market almost doubling in size from 2009 to 2010. Hitachi announces a cloud storage system with 3GB of free storage. Adaptec’s 6-series RAID controllers get a design win.

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The Eye-Fi Pro X2 8GB combines a 802.11n WiFi connection and 8GB of Class 6 SD card storage in a standard SDHC card package, delivering a unique value proposition in the process. Serious and recreational photographers alike know that today’s flash storage is great in terms of digital photo storage but there are still memory constraints involved, especially with HD video and the physical act of transferring the cards from device to PC can be painful if done repeatedly. Eye-Fi products have been around for some time now with the cool feature of combining flash storage and a WiFi radio in a small package to alleviate capacity and transfer headaches. I recently became a user with my Canon DSLR and have to say, despite the steep price, I think it was a worthwhile purchase.

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A few bits of this week’s interesting storage news and an update on ServeTheHome including a FTC request in the Seagate-Samsung deal, new Xeon motherboards from Gigabyte, a new USB NAS solution from Addonics, and Patrick running SoCal Tough Mudder this weekend! Read the full story

This weekend I got a call from a local business that produces highlight reels from video game footage. Admittedly, I am not a big gamer (my PS3 was purchased at launch and has played games for less than four hours over the years), but I did think that this would be an interesting opportunity to do some troubleshooting over a rainy weekend. Read the full story

Many users are familiar with Windows networking and browsing shared folders over a local network. For constantly accessed shared folders, a simple way of accessing the same folder immediately is to simply create a shortcut. The other, and potentially better way to regularly access information from a server is to map the shared folder as a network drive. When Windows is started, it will automatically re-connect to this network location. The network location will have a drive letter instead of a potentially long path.. Mapping network drives also tends to make saving documents and other tasks faster. Read the full story

A question that came up recently was how does one setup common applications that work well with NAS systems to write data to network storage versus solid state drives. I decided to take a few snapshots of the test network using Windows 7 libraries, iTunes, Amazon MP3 Downloader, Handbrake and FRAPS which all have highly sequential writes. Another advantage is that once data is written, the data is also read in sequential fashion making great candidates for NAS storage. Finally, for solid state drives that use compression like those based on Sandforce controllers, using network storage provides plenty of performance oftentimes better than the Sandforce SF-1200 controllers. Read the full story

One thing that virtually every major storage player and enterprise has been using for the past few years, and is continuing to use, is a tiered storage approach. This is mainly due to the fact that lower capacity, higher-cost drives tend to have higher performance than larger and less expensive alternatives. The basic premise is to have the most frequently used data stored in the fastest accessible physical storage so that more transactional requests can be accomplished quickly. Augmenting this fast storage is lower cost, high-capacity storage that keeps less frequently stored data online. This guide is meant to be a primer on how this works in a few common scenarios for small businesses and home servers. It should be noted that for home servers primarily storing media files, tiered storage makes less sense since waiting a second or two extra to do hours of relatively low bandwidth sequential transfers is not taxing on storage subsystems. Read the full story

The company behind both FileBrowser and NetPortal reviewed on this site, Stratospherix, has a third app in the stable which has a few pieces of core functionality covered on this site a few times.  ServerControl is Stratospherix’s third application that combines some of the file browsing capabilities of the company’s other applications, but then adds support for remote reboot and shutdown, as well as the administration of Windows Server services through a simple GUI. Read the full story

Welcome to 2011! Over the past year, the ServeTheHome.com readership has grown by almost 25 fold. In visiting other forums, I have noticed that each forum has a specific purpose. Windows Home Server, FreeNAS, unRaid, general data storage, general memory and motherboards and etc. What is lacking is a single place to discuss direct attached storage (DAS), network attached storage (NAS), and storage area networks (SANs) in a single place. Specialized forms are great resources for in-depth support of platforms, however the advice can be far from objective. Read the full story

Regular readers of this site may have read my recent article on an Apple iPad app called FileBrowser which allows a user to connect to a NAS an retrieve files, stream music and video, and etc. After that piece, Stratospherix offered to have me take a look at NetPortal, an app for the iPhone and iPod Touch which allows for similar access to network attached storage. I took them up on the offer.

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