Following on from my popular Asus S101 mod, Look what I just got my hands on: ION2 Powered Dual Core Atom Net-top all I can say is… preliminary results look very good, with very nice performance. Expect a full review and tutorial soon. =)
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Following on from my previous post regarding AFP and iSCSI benchmarks i’ve decided (after many requests) to post a few raw benchmarks of the system gathered by bonnie++, the environment is as follows:
CPU: Athlon 64 3700+
RAM: 2gb DDR400
Controllers: 2x SATA-II and 1x SATA-I
Hard Drives: 7x Samsung 2tb Spinpoint F3 5600 RPM
OS: NexentaStor 3
ZFS Config: Standard raidz1 with dedup=off and compression=off
So I gathered a few results… after some annoying results I found a bottleneck in my system on 1 of the drives that seemed to bring the benchmark result down greatly, however once this was worked out I acheived the following: Continue reading
Send to KindleUPDATED WITH BOTH iSCSI & AFP RESULTS
I’ve recently setup a ZFS raidz with 7 disks using NexentaStor, natively this doesn’t come with AFP, but I managed to get a package and get this all working (which i’ll demo in an upcoming tutorial), one thing i noticed however is that I could never find any benchmarks that tested the general use of a NAS… i.e. using CIFS or AFP over a network to another machine and testing performance. There are literally 0 AFP benchmarks for NexentaStor due to its non-native support. So here it is
Test Environment:
NAS: 7 SAMSUNG Spinspoint F3 2tb Hard drives connected via SATA & SATA-II, in a ZFS raidz running on NexentaStor 3
Network: 1000BaseT Gigabit LAN
Test Machine: MacMini with 1gb memory (disk tests are cached in memory for speed) running XBench to benchmark
… Continue reading
Send to KindleMany people already know that the Samsung green drives have a bug in the firmware that may cause data loss, Samsung have created a patch that you need to create a bootable floppy disk along and drag in their file, if like me you don’t have a floppy disk drive & don’t want to mess around with USB booting and creation of a drive or just cannot boot from USB then you’ll need another solution, i’ve put together a quick bootable CDROM ISO that contains freedos and the patch, simply boot and type F4EG and hit enter, the patch will automatically detect your drives and update them. I hope this helps people out as it did me. As quoted from the original site:
“If identify commmand is issued from host during NCQ write command in the condition of PC ,
write condition is unstable.
So It can make the loss of written data.”
(Model : F4EG HD204UI, HD204UI/Z4, HD204UI/UZ4, HD155UI, HD155UI/Z4, HD155UI/UZ4)
Samsung Article regarding firmware and affected drives
Send to KindleWell, i’ve used FreeNAS for around 2 years+ now, and all has been good, however, in that time demand for large quantities of storage has now been joined by demand for high speed storage; Once I had replaced all of my drives with 2tb 7200rpm drives I realised that FreeNAS wasn’t giving me the performance on each drive that i’d like.
Welcome NexentaStor… a storage appliance natively supporting ZFS as its based on OpenSolaris! NexentaStor offers many of the same features of FreeNAS, however at a greater level of performance. This comes at a cost though, the free Community edition is limited to a some what large 18tb, whereas the paid version will cost you.
Also NexentaStor is a pure storage appliance, although it supports CIFS/iSCSI/NFS and the likes, it does not have all the bells and whistles of FreeNAS… but for me, there is no use having all these features if I can’t have the speed.
I’m installing NexentaStor now as we speak, after which I’ll be posting a review / tutorial on NexentaStor after i’ve got it up and running and configured to my liking 
I hope you enjoy it!
Send to KindleHi everyone! I keep getting lots of emails from people asking where they can buy xyz to complete the tutorials and try out some of the things listed on CaptainGeek, well after I kept emailing people the same links i had a thought, why not setup an amazon affiliate store. Basically, i’ve setup a small amazon site with a small selection of products (only those used for the tutorials on this site + related ones), purchases and payments are handled by amazon, however a small percentage of the sale goes to helping fund the server this website is hosted on AT NO EXTRA COST TO YOU so its a win win situation, please use the links whenever you can.
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