Above image courtesy of Samsung's SATA to PCIe article, excerpt here: When the 8 channels in typical applications are multiplied by the 400 MB/s transfer rate spanning multiple NAND Flash memories, the result is a 3.2 GB/s data transfer speed. This transfer rate is out of range for SATA to…
Our family's gZilla gaming system is based on an Intel Core i7 2600K and an ASRock Z68 motherboard, from mid 2011. This system started life hidden in our basement, with 2 video cables running up to the family room's 55" TV one floor above it, and to a 24" monitor next to the TV, where the…
VMware ESXi or Microsoft Hyper-V home labs crave RAM. Lots of RAM. It's likely the bottleneck you'll bump into first. It's also not easily upgradeable, once you hit your CPU/motherboard limits. So we continue to wait for possible solutions. My own 2011-vintage Z68 based vZilla build has 32GB of…
One my shortest, simplest articles ever, but of high value to the fellow home lab enthusiast that may be afflicted by the occasional PSOD. Alas, over the past 23 months of running vZilla, it hasn't all been roses and sunshine. One vexing, intermittent problem that cropped up mid 2012 had to do with…
I'm still rather fond of how TinkerTry.com/vzilla turned out, but I realize that those buying new are likely to shop around for a Z77 based system with decent ESXi 5.0 function. While I cannot speak from first hand experience, I can say that this isn't the first time I've heard of the continued …
Before voting closes on June 8th, please consider the sessions you'd like to see presented at VMworld 2012 this August 26th-30th in San Francisco CA: www.vmworld.com/www.vmworld.com/cfp.jspa Also consider voting for a session I proposed called: Session 2358 "Build Your Own VMware vSphere Home …
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 h…
This article is rather unique, because it's entirely contributed by a site visitor. Allan happens to have started out with the Commodore VIC-20, as did I! That's right, I couldn't afford the Commodore 64, but this article isn't about me. Allan's enthusiasm for sharing is incredible, and his story i…
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…
Feb 22 2012 Update: $207.99 USD after promo code, ends midnight eastern time tonight! Here's the purchase link: www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231487 Here's my DIMM drama. An intriguing tale of a month or so of oh no, followed by 32GB of sweet oh yeah! When purchasing a 4 DIMM s…
Finally, here it is, one of my most useful videos to date, hopefully you'll agree. It's particularly helpful for those who have never taken the time to get NTP and hosts files working in a no-DNS home router environment, or never deployed the VMware vCenter Server Appliance. This step-by-step guide …
As you may recall, I had success with configuring VMDirectPath for all 4 USB 3.0 ports on my HighPoint RU1144A, as I detailed here, with screenshots and a video walk-thru. I even told HighPoint about this success with ESXi 5.0 pass through, on my recent visit to their booth at CES last week. I've…
I have two videos to share, from the guy who is responsible for supporting those Fractal Design USB 3.0 upgrade kits. Actually, just last week, I installed the USB 3.0 upgrade kit in vZilla, which took all of 10 minutes, and was quite straight forward. These cases all have a lot of drive bays, and a…
At last, the parts list is finalized, the USB 2.0 ports on the Fractal Design case are upgraded to USB 3.0, the RAID is configured, and VMware ESXi 5.0 is humming along nicely with many VMs. It's good to finally have the entire physical layout completed, the cables managed, and the basic settings…
I prefer to perform my own tests, rather than just trusting marketing hype, when determining which utilities and tools I'll consider for my backup and virtualization server. There's a lot of information about ASRock's XFast USB Utility out there, and I used the latest version 3.02.19 from ASRock,…
Turns out that getting into the RAID configuration screen can be tricky on Z68 consumer-oriented motherboards (affordable), versus server class motherboards (expensive). For my TinkerTry.com/vzilla virtualization lab/backup server project, I had finalized my choices of RAID and motherboard: LSI …
Feb 28 2012 Update: Great news, with some patience and careful shopping, ~$200 USB can now get you 32GB of RAM that works great, given 32GB is what the free Hypervisor 5.0 supports maximum anyway, good deal! TinkerTry.com/32gb-memory-on-asrock-fatal1ty-z68-professional-gen3-motherboard I cannot…
Clearly he's got mad skills. And yes, school and homework are always first with Boyo, where's he's also excelling. Once he proved himself with growing SC2 skills this past spring of 2011, it became clear his 4 year old laptop was holding him back, even with its discrete graphics. First, we built a to…
Mar 14, 2012 Update: For more pics, see also TinkerTry.com/gzillacompleted. For more backstory, see also tinkertry.com/boyobio. For boyo's new site, see boyostarcraft.com. Back when creating vZilla, I decided to standardize on this same motherboard I've become quite familiar with, for a gaming …
It would appear to be a bad idea to use an older SSD if you're trying to speed up a 3x1TB RAID0 array. Let me explain/demonstrate. I recently looked for an SSD for RAID caching, on my Z68 mobo with Intel Smart Response Technology (SRT), and/or LSI 9265-8i RAID. I already had the three 1TB Hitachi dr…
I'm very happy to have finally received my ThinkPad W520. Set original preload drive aside for a bit, to play with Windows 8 Developer Preview for a bit fun first, seen here: https://tinkertry.com/windows8onw520 Now back to getting this laptop ready for work. 1) Memory I needed to upgrade to 16GB, …
Here's the original title of this article: "RAID controllers with >2TB drive support, 6Gb/sec (SATA3) support, and various levels of SSD caching: results of my taking both the LSI 9260-8I and the Adaptec 2405Q out for a spin" Kind of a mouthful, eh? Hopefully my new title is both more c…
I may have launched TinkerTry.com/vzilla nearly a month ago, but the vZilla documentation wasn't really complete. I need to add far more build details (photos, storage configuration, video of building RAID array, etc), and reorganize the way that I present the information. Now that I've completed th…
I recently learned that there may be some special considerations when shopping for a new, efficient, and properly sized power supply/UPS combination. I don't know for sure, but it didn't really cost me significantly more money, and I now know first-hand that my UPS seems to work fine with my power …
TinkerTry - PCs, EVs, home tech, efficiency and more, including virtualization. My opinions here, not my employer's.
Paul Braren, MCSE in 1998, VCP #2681 in 2005, vExpert 2014 to 2024, Veeam Vanguard Emeritus, 2015 to 2019.
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Easily update VMware ESXi at TinkerTry.com/easy-update-to-latest-esxi
After 6 successful years testing then shipping well over 1,000 Xeon D Bundles, Wiredzone had to stop selling them in mid-2021 due to cost, supply, and logistics challenges. The Xeon D-1700/2700 (Ice Lake D) was a minor refresh for 2023, with Xeon D-1800/2800 (Granite Rapids D) refresh slightly better in 2024, and hopefully Xeon 6 (Granite Rapids-D) much better in 2025 featuring PCIe Gen5, MCRDIMMs, and 100GbE networking, wow! I'm glad it's Pat Gelsinger at Intel's helm in these challenging times, and grateful to have had the honor of working at VMware when he was the CIO there. I'll leave it at that, given the whole Broadcom thing.
