Posts Tagged ‘Norco’
The Big WHS: February 2011 Update
It has been a long time since I have posted about The Big WHS. At the last update in May 2010, the machine occupied 8U using two 4U enclosures, and was topping 60TB of raw storage capacity. Since then there have been quite a fe...
First Look: Norco 2U and 4U JBOD and SAS Expander Chassis Releasing Next Week!
Norco is a server case manufacturer that is very popular with home build enthusiasts as they provide inexpensive means to house large quantities of disks in 2U, 3U, and 4U configurations. Like the DIY JBOD/ SAS Expander project...
120mm Fan Partition for Norco RPC-4220 and RPC-4020
Norco has a reputation for providing inexpensive server rackmount cases that are oftentimes good enough for many home and small business applications. Being server cases, popular models like the RPC-4220 and RPC-4020 are built ...
Mid-range DIY Storage Server Buyer’s Guide, December 2010
Having recently published the high-end home/ small business December 2010 buyer’s guide, I received a lot of feedback requesting items for the mid and low-end guides. The mid-range I define as a minimum of six drives in the s...
High-End DIY Storage Server Buyer’s Guide, December 2010
A constant question I am asked is what is a good NAS build for various usage scenarios. Based largely on my experiences with things like The Big WHS and reviewing other components for this site, I have put together two power-us...
Supermicro X8ST3-F Motherboard Review
My main server, the Big WHS now houses over 60TB of storage, runs multiple VM’s, and has over 10 Gigabit NICs. At the heart of this server, is a Supermicro X8ST3-F. It was not the first motherboard I tried in the server, ...
Patriot PS-100 Benchmark Update New Firmware v3.000
The Patriot PS-100 32GB continues to be a very low cost SSD after rebates. I purchased two of the drives early on and did both single drive and raid 0 benchmarks. After that I did PS-100 firmware 2.008 benchmarks. Recently, Pat...
Intel Xeon X3440 for the Windows Home Server Mini-Review
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 relati...
SAS Expanders, Build Your Own JBOD DAS Enclosure and Save – Iteration 2 – A Better Solution
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 im...
The Big WHS: May Update 60TB Edition
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...
