I’ve been watching the beta firmware levels, knowing that support for Ivy Bridge CPUs was coming in a new BIOS that ASRock was cooking up for users of the ASRock Fatal1ty Z68 Professional Gen3 motherboard, such as my tinkertry.com/vzilla and tinkertry.com/gzilla systems. Thanks to Roy’s comment here on Tinkertry earlier today, I was alerted that the BIOS 2.10 had finally been published, and Roy already applied the update...

You may recall my saga of the major "turbo" boost I gave my stock ThinkPad W520 last October, using 2 8GB Kingston RAM kits, a 128GB RunCore mSATA SSD for my Windows 7 C: drive, and two 1TB Western Digital 1TB Scorpio Blue drives in a RAID0 for my D: drive...it's worked out quite nicely, this is a fast system...but I also admit that I've had issues with power management, possibly related to the SSD...

At last, received part # LSI00290 today, directly from LSI. Description on box: LSI00290 LSI CacheCade Software, Advanced Software Option Hardware Key. I like the notches that grab the tiny card when it's fully inserted, and hold it in place...here's the unboxing and installation...

If you are keen on shopping for a Z77 motherboard, and really have your heart set on VMDirectPath , then this article is for you! Be sure not to miss the the Google Doc that Bryce has created, this thing is a masterpiece. It goes way more in depth than my original, July 2011 spreadsheet about Z68 VMDirectPath successes and failures...VT-d capability is handy for when you'd like to be able to "pin" current and future PCI devices to a particular VM, side-stepping...

Finally, the drum-roll moment, will CacheCade Pro 2.0′s Read and Write caching of my LSI 9265-8i’s RAID5 work well?  Will my RAID5 array become the homebrew SAN and NAS of my dreams, far exceeding most typical under $1,000 USD NAS appliances? Am I taking a risk by marrying an enterprise RAID adapter with such a “consumerish” SSD, with potentially immature Indilinx firmware on Marvell...

I'm working with LSI support, who just doesn't have proper answers to most of the following questions quite yet. But while we wait, the good news is we can give CacheCade 2.0 Pro / FastPath a 30 day trial right now, by following these 3 steps: a) buy SSD(s), attach to available SATA connection(s) on your LSI RAID adapter (see item #4 below) b) update to the latest MSM (MegaRAID Storage Manager), see tinkertry.com/msminstallonwindows (or use an...

I have a lot of great stuff cooking, almost ready to be consumed. Hot off-the-press stories to expect this month include: SSD chosen to cache both reads and writes on a RAID5 array, under ESXi 5 | Re-testing nested Hyper-V / How to handle graceful ESXi/VM shutdown when power is lost, using CyberPower UPS USB-connected to the VMware VMA Appliance / Whole home backup generator...with the unique ability to get along with my CyberPower UPSs / <$100 USD upgrade: affordable ceiling fixture/LED combo.../ Jabra 9470 DECT cordless head-set review...

Today, I performed a continuation of my Google+ Hangout tests last weekend, and this week with Jim Collison and Greg Welch.  Most of those test are described at tinkertry.com/google-hangout-testing. It could be a while before Google+ Hangout on Air is available. When it does arrive, with convenient auto-publishing to YouTube, it may not record in high enough resolution to be useful for capturing demonstrations or screen sharing sessions...

Special thanks to Audiblackrs4, for this interesting new Disqus thread about the new LSI’s CacheCade Pro 2.0 firmware and power savings. This could be very helpful for anybody out there who preferred that their drives spin-down when idle. Curious about how many watts drives burn? Take a look at tinkertry.com/vzillastoragereasoning for the story behind this graphic I created a few months back:   Here’s the...

Today, a bunch of the friends of the Home Server Show and I did several Google+ Hangouts, over a period of nearly 4 hours. Special thanks to David McCabe, Jim Collison, Rich O’Neil, Jim Collison, Michael Faucher, Mike Howard, John Zajdler, Tim Black, and many more. This was a revisit of sorts, given some new features have emerged since 2011. We learned a few good lessons along the way, including XSplit Broadcaster...

Got comments on an article you read on tinkertry.com? Bring your questions and yourself to Tinkertry.com's first Google+ Hangout! Planning to do some screen sharing as well. I may also use XSplit Broadcaster to stream the Google+ Hangout to justin.tv/tinkertry, for those who prefer to "live lurk" instead. Not sure yet if I'll also keep the recording, let's see how...

You receive the warning "Computer Monitoring Error" in Windows Home Server 2011 after you install Update Rollup 2, this includes the message "Can only partially assess the health of this computer," you can install this on the server and have the fix propagated to all clients, read more for details...

I "deployed" two Ooma Telo VOIP devices in my home late last year, and went into "production" immediately. I left Vonage after 7 years because their prices kept creeping up, and I had some technical issues that recently that pushed me to make the switch. My total costs went from about $70 monthly for 2 Vonage lines, down to about $29 monthly for 2 Ooma lines. Those US prices include all taxes and surcharges...

The differences in port placement of the 9265 and 9266 are shown in the graphic I created...There's a lot of back and forth going on between LSI support and sales...All of this LSI info was admittedly far more difficult to find than it should be. Let's hope this will be cleared up once the 9266 card, and the separate CacheCade Pro 2.0/FastPath combination (part #LSI00293 for 9265/9266), arrive later this month. If the speed and stability turn out to be that all we're hoping...

This article is rather unique, because it's entirely contributed by a site visitor...Allan's enthusiasm for sharing is incredible, and his story is a good read. I'm hoping we can chime in, and let Allan know what we think. He does pose some interesting perspectives and questions, and I am curious if you feel this system might also be a contender as a known-good ESXi 5.0 virtualization solution...

These...instructions are likely to help you get your MegaRAID Storage Manager 11.08.03.0300 version working...but there's some gotchas with installing MSM that warrant a far more detailed walk through below, or a closer look at my detailed video walk-throughs...

Here’s what the readme says: This is a major product refresh with numerous bug fixes and enhancements, including adding CacheCade Pro 2.0 and CacheVault support (if enabled). So keep in mind that this firmware and MSM MegaRAID Manager interface merely prepares you for the long awaited read/write cache of your RAID5 array, you still need to separately purchase CacheCade Pro 2.0, which hasn’t yet shown up in...

Yes, the faithful, rugged 5-year-old Lenovo ThinkPad T61 and its 1280x800 screen has now been displaced by a shiny new 2048x1536 touch display and Apple Wireless keyboard combo, Apple TV remote close by. The laptop weighed in at nearly $2000 back in 2007. The new $600 32GB 3rd Gen iPad, with shipping, taxes, and the many accessories and apps listed below, weighs in at around $1000...Any regrets? None so far! Interesting observations? You betcha! Instinctively the...

The Core i7 Mac mini uses lesser video (server style), but does allow you to install and use ESXi 5.0 just fine, apparently...but the Core i5 Mac mini with the decent GPU...well...

With the LSI 9266-4i/9266-8 RAID adapter expected next month, and new Ivy Bridge motherboards arriving this summer, I've begun to wonder, if I was setting out to build my virtualization system today, would I choose different parts than I did back in June of 2011? Read/write caching using SSDs seems to be hot right now, in the enterprise...all the way down to the under $200 consumer market, with the Seagate Momentus XT...

   This Core i5 Mac Mini 2011 started life with 4GB of RAM, a 500GB traditional (slow, 5400) hard drive, and respectable discreet graphics. A very efficient and cool little beast! Beefing it up considerably will likely not increase the watt burn much (which I’ll measure before and after), or heat output. the goal is to accelerate and learn, by providing a way to toggle between OSs, running at full native speeds the idea is not...

This 5.0 Update 1 patch, and installable version, were released today...I haven't yet spotted whether this affects Windows 8 Consumer Preview or Windows Server 8 Beta behavior much, other than this sentence in the release notes...vCenter Server adds support for customization of the following guest operating systems: Windows 8...VMware SVGA 3D driver now installs as part of the new bundled VMware tools...