Alas, we canceled our Netflix account years ago. It was turning us into zombies.

Just for giggles... the new system stability benchmark: Win 8.1 w/Bing Disk Cleanup!

The Zbox BI320 is part of Zotac's B series (where "B" stands for Basic). There's a bunch of different configurations, many are country-specific. I'm in the USA where two versions are readily available: Barebones P/N: ZBOX-BI320-U Mini PC P/N: ZBOX-BI320-U-W2 (The "U" means USA market, the "W2" inclu...

1. Are weather extremes something you consider more often? Yes, but mostly because we're thinking of moving. Our current house is old, drafty and thermally inefficient. Lots of character, though! Our next house will have much less character but will be thermally more efficient. I can say this becau...

The Serve the Home admin posted power consumption numbers here : Power Consumption: 5.4-5.8w Windows Desktop 11.8w maximum Cinebench 11.5 run There's a long-ish thread on the XBMC/Kodi forums about it: Zotac ZBOX BI320 *Opinion please* Too good to be true? Here's some SPCR- and HTPC-applicable quote...

[ EDIT: 17 FEB 2015, SOLD OUT BY ABOUT DINNER TIME ] This is an inexpensive complete desktop PC. It's price jumps around between $160-$200. It's on sale today at Newegg for $140. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16883218045 CPU: Haswell Celeron 2957U (1.40GHz) RAM: two slots , one...

Thanks all, The problems with realtek NICs are way overblown. Yes, they do use more CPU than better cards but for 99% of uses they are just fine. If you were trying to to DPI at full Gbit then high end NICs are needed. At 10 Mbit not so much, your system probably wont even notice the tiny bit of ext...

pfsense doesn't usually (always?) receive timely driver updates from FreeBSD. Some Realtek controllers are supported, but almost everyone recommends sticking to mature Intel controllers. Whether that's just fanboyism or not, I'm not experienced enough to judge. The GA-C1037 boards have Realtek 8111x...

Hi all, I've been casually "shopping" for router hardware for about a year. I'm in no big rush and was hoping something used would fall into my lap. I want to play around with router distros (pfsense and sophos specifically). HCLs usually recommend Intel NICs, and I won't argue with that. Luckily us...

An article arguing against cloud storage - published and distributed via google docs! :D Regarding the article: Who is the author? Who is his/her intended audience? Why was it published as a google doc? Why should we consider Marken Communications an authority on this topic? Ultimately I agree with ...

Quick followup ... my new VS24AH-P makes ZERO noise. So that's cool. But now I understand what "IPS glow" is...

Terrific - thanks washu. For what it's worth, PassMark comparison of andyb's A64 4000+ to the Atom D510 and Celeron 1007u: Clipboard01.png For USD $90 , the Gigabyte is a really neat little board. The dual NICs is cool, but frustrating that Gigabyte dedicated 2 PCIe lanes to a PCIe-PCI bridge chip a...

Back to the original question on CPU requirements... Assuming the network is up to the task (iperf to check), and the storage is up to the task (ramdisk? to make sure), and the OS is up to the task, then A person could start with a too-powerful CPU and tweakable BIOS and work backwards, under-clocki...

I tried assembling a ZFS test system years ago and gave up. OpenSolaris was too picky about hardware and what I had on hand was unsupported. The big attraction for me then was end-to-end check summing. Supposedly bit rot is impossible. I didn't catch the reek of ZFS in the Sun paper. Skimming it, my...

Thanks both of you for taking the time. Error probability: 1 in 10^14 bits This isn't what WD's spec says. They say <1, not 1. You're right, sloppy reading on my part. There's no reason for a RAID array to simply die on the first bit error, even if this type of error was so common. I wondered about ...

Thanks for starting this thread. I've learned (am still learning) a lot. But you lost me a bit in that last post. RAID and backup are not comparable, interchangeable or mutually exclusive - they serve different purposes. I think we agree on that. There are risks of data loss / corruption with any sc...

Weren't a lot of old mouse pads neoprene? You know, the floppy rubber kind with fabric top, where after a few years the fabric adhesive starts to fail?! But you hang on to it because, you're like, "ah - what's the difference? It's not so bad." And as the years go by, the university logo that was pri...

I originally went for RAID-5 a number of years ago (originally with 4x 1TB Drives) for the following reasons (in no specific order). A single massive volume rather than several smaller volumes. Redundancy without losing as much HDD space as RAID 0, or 10. Better performance than a single drive. I t...

My system: Motherboard: Intel DH77EB CPU: Core i5-3750K @ stock clocks and voltage Case: Antek NSK3480 Rear exhaust fan: Arctic Cooling F12 PWM 120mm Following kater's thread " Ninja SNCJ-1000 for socket 1155 with Noctua backplate " I franken-hacked my 1st gen Scythe Ninja on my LGA1155 motherboard....

@ andyb: are you using raid5 purely to achieve 100+ MB/s network I/O? Or uptime? How long are rebuilds @ 12TB? We moved to RAID10 at work for our db server after reading Oracle's SAME paper and the unrelated but more entertaining BAARF . I don't know what you're applications are, so this may not be ...

... the voice quality is just now getting up to where Skype was 5 years ago I had a cell phone some 14 years ago, hated it, and was THRILLED when I accidentally dropped & broke it. I subsequently avoided them until about a year ago; we had our first child and my wife insisted that I be reachable at...

As I understand it, Server 2003 is based on XP. Aside from SMB1, it uses XP's file copy engine. Vista SP1 brought many improvements: http://blogs.technet.com/b/markrussinovich/archive/2008/02/04/2826167.aspx @washu - you are more knowledgeable re: linux than I ... assuming it supported Andy's raid c...

The option's called max protocol or something. Search the manpage. Ubuntu might have enabled it by default for all I know. Thank you. Per: http://www.samba.org/samba/history/samba-3.6.0.html SMB2 support ------------ SMB2 support in 3.6.0 is fully functional (with one omission), and can be enabled ...

You must be using SMB 2.0 or higher on BOTH the server and client. This means Windows Vista+ or Samba 3.6+. If you are using Samba SMB 2.0 must also be enabled, it is often turned off by default. Today my D510MO server runs Ubuntu 12.04 server w/Samba version 3.6.3. I dug through the samba config f...

I built a D510MO music server about 4 years ago. It used a 5400 RPM WD notebook drive. It ran whatever Ubuntu server version was current at that time; I am unsure which SMB implementation was used. My build thread had jperf and iozone test results, but I see today that imageshack broke the photos. T...

I mentioned iperf because of Andy's comment

This of course leaves the elephant in the room, the networking equipment itself.

It's probably not cabling/switch/NICs, but you never know.

You can use iperf / jperf to check your network equipment.
https://code.google.com/p/xjperf/

Old how-to:
http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/lanwan/l ... ance-jperf

Assuming all's well, you should see 900Mb/s or better NIC to NIC.

1 - It isn't such a cool place, even for not so hot hardware. 2 - It isn't very quiet, definitely. 3 - It isn't as serviceable as larger enclosures. 3 - It isn't affordable at all. So why SPCR actually recommend it? That's a fair question to ask, since this is SPCR. Regarding your points 1 and 2 ab...

Thanks for the review. I found the M1 thread on [H] after it had sold out. This case is truly a gem. I read most of the original M1 thread and didn't get the impression that the designers were trying to please everybody. They had to please enough people to get sufficient orders of course. I think th...

Is it worth it using another video card for PhysX operations only? That's hard to answer without more info. What games do you play that use PhysX? For me, it's Borderlands. What resolution are you pushing? I have a single GTX 660Ti which is doing PhysX. My monitor is 1920x1200. With PhysX set to hi...