Recent content by Albuquerque

Sooo, it's been a year. Guess what? One of my server drives died. But guess what else: it wasn't one of the RAID6 drives ;) I have two other RAID1 volumes on that server, one for the OS + apps and another for all the virtual machine files. One of the drives for the virtual machine files is...

I own two, and they do great for their intended uses. My first purchase of the 500GB spindle / 4GB SSD model was back when my wife's WD Blue 120GB in her Dell Mini 10v committed suicide. That box had always booted slow, so I used the time to upgrade her to Win7 Pro, drop in a Momentus XT, and...

A few points. Your first question was regarding the use of a single SSD for both OS boot and volume caching. In the most simplistic sense, you are correct in that you cannot install the OS to the SSD first, then enable caching from that SSD to another volume. However, someone with a bit of...

It's been almost six months since I posted my last update in this thread; I figured someone might stumble onto this thread while researching and what to know how it really turned out. A few months ago, Highpoint released an updated web interface utility that can now show the SMART status of...

I'm not actually using the enterprise version. It's a Z77 chipset, so I'm using the commodity / standard version of RST that installs without issue on a Server 2008R2 OS. Thus, I'm using 64GB for cache and the other ~160 usable for scratch space.

I will add to Eldest's information. I'm using Intel SRT on my Windows Server 2008R2 box to pair up a 750Gb RAID1 array and a 240GB Agility 3 SSD for accelerating all of my virtual machines (ie: a non-boot volume.) Rather than speeding up the boot time of the host server itself, which almost...

I'm not sure why you say that; I have eight of those drives in various machines throughout my house. I have one that currently has ~45gb of free space left, and it performs exactly as the others do. In other words: do not spread FUD.

Yes, this. I built up a halfway decent Server 2008R2 rig (it's somewhere in this forum) and I'm using a 240GB Agility 3 as the Intel Z77 RST acceleration drive for the VHD-storage RAID1 array. It's amazing how much it helps the performance of my virtual machines, and I bought it for CHEAP...

You can attach or detach the caching SSD drive at any point from any other drive or array without harm to the underlying data.

Look into the Highpoint 2720SGL card -- a 2-port SAS PCI-E 2.0 8x card for $160 that does really well for RAID0, RAID5 and RAID6 speeds. I'm using two (search for posts by me): one for a 6-drive RAID0 array that does over 2GB/sec with a stack of SSD drives, and another for an 8-drive RAID6...

Howabout if you write your own, but this time, don't make stuff up? A newbie guide shouldn't be 10 pages, it should be perhaps two (obviously a bit more for pictures, but whatever.) It should cite references that can be used for more in-depth reading for those who want to read it. The crux of...

The size of the Windows write buffer is dynamic; it depends on a multitude of circumstances. Obvious things, like the quantity of ram installed in your machine, the quantity of available (unallocated) ram left after the OS and applications have taken their reservations, and the setting for...

It is my interpretation that you simply do not know where to look. For example... Microsoft Software Developers Network contains data all the way down to kernel calls for everything in the OS stack. The freely available technical library and resources are appalling in scope, depth, and...

The reality is that harddrive preference is just like any other preference: everyone has had a good or bad experience with any and all vendors. I've personally experienced a monumental amount of failures of Western Digital disks in my distant and recent past, yet I have twelve Western Digital...

Depending on the amount of data, cloud storage is a good way to secure things "off site". But any more than ~5 to 7GB of data and you'll be paying for it. RAID1 is a disk mirror set: two disks mirror eachother. One drive can fail without losing your data. RAID5 is a disk parity set: multiple...