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Archive for the ‘Hardware’ Category

DIY: Home UBUNTU NAS Server

September 5th, 2011 No comments

A detailed blog post which covers hardware and software choices.

For the hardware, I ended up with a fanless MiniITX motherboard Intel D510MO, which has a Atom processor, Gigabit ethernet (all my home network is Gigabit, so it does make a difference). I am also using a 2GB 800Mhz Kingston RAM memory, and both two SATA connectors. The MOBO has up to seven 2.0 USB and one mini PCI Express, in case I want to add more SATA drives in the future.

via DanielAndrade.net

Thecus N2200XXX Review

September 5th, 2011 No comments

A quick review with a few benchmarks.

Thecus is the first dual-bay NAS box manufacturer we’ve seen to ditch the usual ARM or Marvell processors found in mainstream models in favour of a fully fledged 1.8GHz Intel Atom D525 CPU.

via bit-tech.net

Thecus Rolls Out Core i3, SAS Rackmount NAS

August 19th, 2011 No comments

A professional rackmount version of a DIY NAS, with link aggregation and redundant power:

The N8900 is based on a dual-core Intel Core i3-2120 processor with 8 GB of DDR3 memory and Thecus Dual DOM flash memory.

via SmallNetBuilder

Categories: Complete Systems, News, Thecus

Synology DS211+ SMB NAS Review

February 28th, 2011 No comments

AnandTech dissects, thoroughly reviews, and benchmarks the Synology DS211+:

Synology has a sensible model number nomenclature in which the last two digits refer to the year through which the model is intended for sale. The first set of digits refer to the maximum number of bays supported. Some models have a + at the end, signifying higher performance. Today, we have the DS211+ for review. The DS refers to the product category, Disk Station. 2 indicates a 2 bay model, and the 11 indicates a 2011 model. It is supposed to have a higher performance compared to the DS211 which was released in November 2010.

Western Digital Caviar Green 3TB and My Book Essential 3TB Drives Reviewed

November 29th, 2010 No comments

AnandTech takes the brand new 3.0 TB Western Digital internal hard drives for a spin.

Today, Western Digital takes it one step further and announces availability of the internal drive as well. The Caviar Green line is now home to a 2.5TB and a 3.0TB model, priced at $189 and $239 respectively.

Promise Fastrak TX4650 Review

August 7th, 2010 No comments

bit-tech.net reviews the Promise Fastrak TX4650, a 4-port SATA software RAID PCI-E card, and benchmarks it against the Intel ICH10R.

How to build a NAS box

July 25th, 2010 1 comment

bit-tech.net has a new article on building a FreeNAS box, including choosing hardware and installing the software.

Awesome Custom Built 16 TB Atom Powered NAS

June 26th, 2010 No comments

Will Urbina has posted full build pics of a low power NAS using an Atom processor, HighPoint 8-port RAID card, and eight 2 TB SATA drives.

Black Dwarf

Western Digital’s VelociRaptor VR200M hard drive

April 6th, 2010 No comments

The Tech Report reviews Western Digital’s latest in high performance spindle-based desktop storage.

can the new VelociRaptor compete in this rapidly evolving storage market, or has it become, well, a dinosaur?

via The Tech Report .

Categories: Hard Drives, Reviews

Drobo FS 5-Bay NAS Released

April 6th, 2010 No comments

The Drobo FS is one of the first entry-level NAS systems to include 5-bays, most products in this class only support 4-bays. This means that the maximum capacity of the Drobo FS is 10TB, compared to 8TB in four-bay NAS units.

via StorageReview.com.

Categories: Complete Systems, Drobo, News

LSI MegaRAID SATA and SAS 9260-8i RAID Card Review – RAID Cards and You – Legit Reviews

January 20th, 2010 No comments

Legit Reviews takes a 6Gbps SATA/SAS LSI RAID card for and spin and ends up with a lot of performance graphs.

Today I have LSI’s latest RAID card, the MegaRAID 9260-8i SAS 6Gbps controller. Featuring a compact PowerPC RAID-on-Chip controller, 512mb of DDR2 cache, a PCIe 2.0 x8 slot, and SAS/SATA 6Gbps connectivity, the 9260-8i is one well equipped RAID card. Marketing documentation boasts of maximum 2875MB/s reads and 1850MB/s writes through the 800MHz PowerPC LSISAS2108 ROC, well over three times the throughput limits of the ICH10R controller built into Intel’s desktop platforms.

Categories: Benchmarks, LSI, RAID Cards

A quick first look at USB 3.0 performance

December 7th, 2009 No comments

The Tech Report has benchmarks of the new USB 3.0 standard. They’re compared against USB 2.0 and eSATA.

Categories: Benchmarks, USB

Petabytes on a budget: How to build cheap cloud storage

December 6th, 2009 No comments

Backblaze details how they build a 67 TB 4U storage server for less than $8,000. C0T0D0S0 then takes a look at some of the trade offs of the device against much more expensive systems.

DIY NAS with Debian Lenny

November 30th, 2009 No comments

Versia has a comprehensive guide to setting up Debian 5.0 on a VIA ARTiGO A2000 barebones storage server.

This post will explain how to set up a NAS server with Debian running essential services such as ssh, samba, nfs, cups, rdiff-backup and rtorrent with a web interface; and using two HDDs in RAID 1 mode with everything encrypted. It took me awhile to research all bits and pieces, hopefully it will save you time if you are going to do a similar set up.

2.5 *terabyte* hot-swap storage — for $730

May 10th, 2007 1 comment

George Ou over at ZDNet.com has a blog post about adding a good chunk of storage to his computer. All that is needed to duplicate this is 3 free drive bays, 5 free SATA ports, and a power supply that can handle the extra 150 watts while the drives spin up.

Fast forward 15 years later, and I just bought 2.5 terabytes of hot-swappable SATA-300 storage for just under $730.

Categories: Chassis, Hard Drives, How-To