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As was recently seen with the Opteron 6100 4P platforms, moving to multi-processor systems can yield higher density installations. One challenge motherboard vendors face is that multi-processor designs require more complex traces that cost more to produce. While many users will want full-featured boards with SAS2008 and multiple expansion slots, others just need lower cost processing nodes. The Supermicro H8QGi+-F is currently the lowest-cost 4P G34 platform on the market, and fills the role of a great processing platform quite well. Read the full story

Recently I decided I wanted to reach documents and media stored on my WHS and NexentaStor-ZFS based NASes from my Apple iPad. I have flown about 100,000 miles this year so I am oftentimes far from my NAS. While WHS would provide a solution through its sleek web interface for downloading documents to the iPad, I looked at a few different solutions, and finally have find something that works very well. Read the full story

This weekend I woke up one morning and decided that I wanted to know if retail packaged drives had a lower DOA rate than OEM drives from Newegg. In all fairness, I think I was just trying to put off a 5am Saturday morning gym trip for a few hours. I ended up filtering Newegg’s hard drive category by internal drives of 1TB, 1.5TB, and 2TB in capacity. I then went through each result and recorded the quantity of reviews for each of Newegg’s awesome egg-scale along with a few other parameters. It turns out that Newegg did not have as much information on retail packaged hard drives as I had wanted, but I found some interesting results nonetheless. Anyone can do this survey, but hopefully this saves some time. For the most up-to-date information see Newegg.

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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 with those operating systems and virtualization platforms such as Microsoft’s Hyper-V make the X8SIL-F a strong contender for a DIY storage or virtual machine server.

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Sempron 140 WHS - In a Corsair Cardboard Box

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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 enabled for Raid 0, 1, 10, but not enabled for Raid 5. Unfortuneately, this seems not to be working so the best that can be done is the background garbage collection in firmware v1.5 for OCZ’s Indilinx based SSDs. Since I am only working with two 120GB drives at the moment, I decided to give them a shot. Just for reference, the original benchmarks were done with the standard, off the shelf, Windows 7 64-bit RTM drivers.

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A few weeks ago, I had my main system’s OCZ Vertex 120GB drive die after a Firmware version 1.5 update. After applying the allegedly successful v1.5 firmware update, I started seeing data corruption issues. A few days later, the drive failed to be recognized by any system I own regardless of which onboard SATA controller I tried or even with raid card was used. Just to give an idea of the timeline:

1. Day 0- the SSD drive died, RMA request sent to OCZ (past working hours)
2. Day 1- SSD information such as serial numbers was given to OCZ and a RMA number was issued
3. Day 2 (Friday)- SSD was shipped to OCZ’s San Jose, CA facility (which is <20 miles away)
4. Day 5 (Monday)- SSD was delivered to OCZ
5. Day 9 (Friday)- Another SSD arrived via FedEx from OCZ in shrinkwraped retail packaging

Somewhere in there I ordered another 120GB Vertex from Amazon.com which arrived on Day 8 of the timeline above since I was running out of space anyway.

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Intel’s Clarkdale and H55/ H57 platforms are quite intriguing for several reasons. First, the performance is fairly good starting at 2.93ghz, and with hyperthreading, it is possible to get closer to a quad core performance in some tasks where multiple cores do well, such as video encoding. A second aspect is that Intel moved the IGP to an on package solution and really cut the power consumption/ heat dissipation of the platform. Finally, the cost of an i3-530 or i5-650 CPU plus a motherboard is often in the $200 or less range, making them quite affordable.

Two great uses for the chips are home servers and HTPC’s. Low power consumption and low heat generation ultimately enable lower acoustic signatures, as well as lower TCO through lower electric draw.

Core i5-650, Gigabyte H55M-UD2H, Dual Intel Pro/1000 GT PCI NICs

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