Posts Tagged: raid

0AMD Vision Fusion Premium LogoFixed: AMD E350 crashes & invalid boot device error

Published by & filed under Misc Software. Last updated .

I’ve had an AMD E350 sys­tem for over a year, which I use as my primary HTPC. How­ever, in that time I’ve always had oca­sion­al Sta­bil­ity issues where the sys­tem would lock up, reboot, and fail to find the primary HDD. At first I put this down to the HDD — a Seag­ate Momentus XT, which was known to be unre­li­able when it was first released. Since Seag­ate released update firm­ware how­ever the drive has seemed to oper­ate fine, although I could­n’t rule it out. I also updated the BIOS of my Asus E35M1‑M Pro and updated all the drivers I could find, without fully resolv­ing the issue.

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0Storage SpacesMicrosoft Storage Spaces: Virtual RAID for Windows 8?

Published by & filed under Storage. Last updated .

Microsoft’s Steve Sinof­sky has writ­ten a detailed art­icle about a genu­inely excit­ing new fea­ture of Win­dows 8 — Stor­age Spaces.  I won’t repeat the details here, for those you can go straight to the horses mouth.  How­ever I will point out a key line from a home media serv­er point of view: “There’s anoth­er resi­li­ency attrib­ute, called par­ity, which dir­ects Stor­age Spaces to store some redund­ancy inform­a­tion along­side user data con­tained with­in the space, thereby enabling auto­mat­ic data recon­struc­tion in the event of phys­ic­al disk fail­ure.”  To me, this sounds a LOT like a soft­ware RAID5 sim­il­ar to that provided by UnRAID.  Until Win­dows 8 is released and the tech­no­logy is fully reviewed the details are of course some­what spec­u­lat­ive, but my read­ing of the art­icle leads me to believe that Stor­age Spaces will enable the strip­ing of disks, with a par­ity in the event of single disk fail­ure.  Fur­ther, it is reas­on­able to assume that this sys­tem will work with stand­ard non-enter­prise drives without suf­fer­ing any [int­link id=“90” type=“post”]compatibility issues[/intlink].  Finally, it is reas­on­able to assume that Stor­age Spaces will offer some of the per­form­ance bene­fits of hard­ware raid‑5 too.  If you have a home serv­er with a lot of media and you want some redund­ancy, without huge cost, then this tech­no­logy sounds like it might be the per­fect solu­tion.  Thanks Microsoft!

0Media ServerA new Media Server

Published by & filed under Media PC Hardware. Last updated .

As I men­tioned recently, I am [int­link id=“1836” type=“post”]planning a new media system[/intlink] for a new res­id­ence.  Hav­ing already exper­i­mented suc­cess­fully with dvblink, I decided it was time to move my TV cards from my HTPC to my serv­er and hand the duty of record­ing, transcod­ing and stor­ing TV to the serv­er.… Read Full Article

0DVB LogicPlanning a new networked home media setup

Published by & filed under Media PC Hardware, Misc Media Software, Storage. Last updated .

In the com­ing months I will be buy­ing a new prop­erty, and to go with my new home, I’ve been read­ing up lots on how I might integ­rate a new home media setup.  In recent months sev­er­al excit­ing new options have become avail­able, which finally makes the sort of setup I have always desired a real pos­sib­il­ity.… Read Full Article

1Inside HDD LogoHardware RAID and consumer HDD problems

Published by & filed under Storage. Last updated .

A couple of years ago I was lucky enough to have the oppor­tun­ity to pur­chase a second hand hard­ware raid 5 card (an Areca 1220) for a very low price. Since then I have used the card along with sev­er­al sets of drives (ori­gin­ally 300gig, then 750gig and cur­rently 1Tb) in a ded­ic­ated serv­er PC as a large net­work file-store for the fam­ily’s music, pho­tos, videos and back-ups.
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