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With Windows Home Server 2011 coming out in the near future many less experienced home users are looking into RAID subsystems to create larger storage pools. This is a segment where without a very solid basic understanding of what the technologies involved are, a user can make a purchasing decision detrimental to their machine’s ultimate performance and data security. It is important that a user understands the relative strengths and weaknesses of different RAID philosophies, software RAID, “Fake-RAID”, and hardware RAID. Read the full story

One question often asked is what type of connector is needed, or what do all of these connectors mean. I thought that it may benefit my readers to have a quick-and-easy reference to the main SAS and SATA connector types. Some of the below images did get cut-off when being downsized so one may get additional detail by clicking on the images for slightly larger variants. Read the full story

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 posts from a few months ago (using Norco cases nonetheless Iteration 1 and Iteration 2 – A Better Solution) , Norco is releasing new products in the next week aimed at the JBOD/ SAS expander chassis markets. Read the full story

OCZ’s Agility 2 120GB is a new generation of drive based on the SandForce SF-1200 controller. Unlike the OCZ Vertex LE and OCZ Vertex 2 drives, the Agility 2′s SandForce controller has an IOP limit artificially limited in firmware. With that being said, it is also cheaper than the Vertex 2 120GB and is still a very fast SSD, especially with compressible loads.

The short story of the SandForce controller is that it uses an internal encryption/ compression algorithm to write data to NAND faster than other drives. The SandForce based Agility 2 120GB is therefore fairly fast with compressed workloads (i.e. pictures, music files, zip files, ISOs, and etc) and much faster with compressible workloads such as office documents. Another major storyline is that SandForce is a fairly new player and the controllers are of unknown reliability. Finally, originally SandForce reserved much more space on drives in this capacity range for use in wear leveling, cache and etc. OCZ Agility 2 and Vertex 2 SandForce drives were originally 100GB but after being criticized for mediocre cost per GB and with little performance penalty moving from 28GB reserved (old drives were 100GB usable 28GB reserved) to 8GB reserved (new drives are 120GB usable 8GB reserved), the choice to enable the extra capacity was clear.

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I have decided to post a little roadmap of what’s next on the site. I am a list making person, so this will hopefully keep me goal oriented. The next few weeks I will be focusing on some Windows Home Server add-in reviews and guides, some Linux/ OpenSolaris on Hyper-V guides, and some hardware testing. Other potential thoughts I have are to write up how to get decent network performance from a WHS (i.e. over 90MB/s which it seems like there are people who can’t figure this out). I may also move into trying some ESXi virtualization guides, some FreeBSD/ OpenSolaris ZFS guides, and some hardware reviews and benchmarks.

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