• HP MediaSmart EX485/EX487 Review
    • Overview

      Recently I got a nice offer for an HP MediaSmart Server EX485 so I decided to get one for myself and check out what's inside of this little animal. Additionally, it would be nice to compare with my Acer easyStore H340 and compare one with another.

      I will not be going into a deep review about EX485/EX487, but instead I'm going through different hardware tweaks and trick, and compare with similar Acer H340 unit on the power consumption, performance, etc. Ok, enough excuses, let's get to the business..

      The EX485 comes in a little tower case and ...

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    • Installing FreeNAS on Acer Aspire Easystore H340
    • Introduction

      My Network storage exploration never ends. So I recently received an Acer Aspire EasyStore H340 unit to play around. It came with Windows Home Server from the factory, but my idea was to find out how easy to install a different OS (my goal was to have FreeNAS on it).

      There are many reviews about this little box so I'll just briefly describe what it is and what it can do.

      acer-easystore-h340.jpg

      Hardware specifications:

      • Series: Aspire Easystore H340
      • Model: AH340-UA230N
      • CPU: Intel Atom Processor 230 1.6Ghz
      • Chipset: Intel 945GC Express Chipset + ICH7R
      • Motherboard form-factor: Mini-ITX
      • Internal Slot: PCI-express 4x
      • Memory ...

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    • Building a low-cost high-performance home NAS
    • Building a home NAS

      Introduction

      I'm constantly getting asked about how to build a home NAS from my friends and colleagues so I decided to make this small tutorial to help others to better understand how to start and what's required.

      After all, when you build your own peice of equipment then you can choose your priorities (performance, price, power consumption, capacity, etc) and invest more into that.

      Our goal

      My goal is to build the following NAS unit (the highest priority goes first):

      • Reliable.
      • Good capacity.
      • Upgradeability.
      • High performance (the same or better compared to existing manufactured solutions).
      • Low ...

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    • The Chenbro ES34069 Case Review
    • The Chenbro ES34069 Case Review

      Intro

      As many of you, I have several computers at home. That's including a desktop and a few notebooks. All of them are different level of hardware and software (Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, Mac OS X, etc), but all of them need a storage space. I always prefer to have most of the data centralized so I can give a proper attention (backups, maintenance, etc) at one piece of hardware.

      About 3 years ago I built a network storage drive (utilizing FreeBSD and software RAID for higher reliability). When looking at today's technology I decided that ...

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