Category: Hardware

Synology DS211+ SMB NAS Review

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

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.

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

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.

DIY NAS with Debian Lenny

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

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.