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Internal hard drives usually carry a manufacturer’s warranty, commonly three years. Personally, I believe that after three years, one wants to replace drives due to the fact that failures start to occur at a greater rate after three years. One other way to source internal drives for the average consumer is to purchase an external drive and to liberate it from the OEM external enclosure. Generally this means voiding any warranty provided for the drives by the manufacturer.  The question is, can purchasing external drives and voiding warranties be less expensive than purchasing internal drives with warranties.

One interesting data point before this article continues, major OEMs (HP, Dell, Apple, and etc.) and storage firms (EMC and NetApp) purchase drives without warranties and receive discounted pricing. Read the full story

The Supermicro X8SIL-F mATX motherboard is becoming a favorite for home servers, especially those built upon Core i3′s and Core i5′s because it provides lots of expandability in a small form factor, and has IPMI 2.0. The Supermicro X8SIL-F’s supported processors can easily handle a network attached storage (NAS) virtual machine as well as additional virtual machines for other purposes. As I eluded to in my previous post, the major difference between the revision v1.01 and v1.02 boards, at least as far as I have seen, is the support for the Intel Core i3 and i5 CPU’s as well as the Intel Pentium G6950 in the v1.02 X8SIL-F versus support only for Intel   CPU’s in v1.01. With the virtualization support and hyperthreading in the Intel Core i3 and i5′s as well as the low power consumption of Intel’s 32nm process, it is a great, low cost and low power combination.

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