Entries Categorized as 'hardware'

Recipe: how to lose 2TB of data

Date September 20, 2008

You will need the following ingredients:
- Promise FastTrak 4310 SATA RAID controller with latest BIOS (2.8.1.0004) and drivers (2.6.1.318)
- four Hitachi HDS721010KLA330 1TB SATA drives
- 2TB of really important data
1. install the Promise controller in PCI slot
2. boot to OS and create RAID5 array on all 4 drives
3. start transferring files to the newly created array
4. [...]

Multimedia PC for $160

Date January 12, 2008

If you were trying to assemble small computer that would fit into sexy case that looks just great in your living room and could act as a multimedia center PC to play music, DVD and even some simple games, until recently there was only one option - all-in-one mini-ITX boards from VIA. These included VIA [...]

Recovering failed RAID0 on Promise 20579 controller

Date January 9, 2008

I know it is a stupid thing to use two 160GB drives in a pseudo-hardware RAID0 array for storing 300GB of important data. It all started as experiment to see how the array will perform and compare the performance with standalone hard drive. My MSI K8T Neo2-F mainboard has two SATA ports included in the [...]

Shopping for treasures on eBay

Date November 15, 2007

Couple of weeks ago I got hooked to eBay.co.uk since I was able to find some great hard-to-resist deals on computer components. It started with simple task - replacement board for dead 7U Xeon server in our office that we used as database server. Not exactly the same board, this one was from SuperMicro, but [...]