Nov 18, 2011 by Paul White

I finally decided that my old USB flash drive was taking up a little too much bulk in my pocket. That and I was close to maxing out its 8GB capacity. So I upgraded to a Super Talent Pico C USB Flash Drive. This is by far the smallest USB drive available ( That I know of ). It also comes in Chrome, Silver, and 24K gold plated finishes. Bling and Nerd Credit come together. I know the question many are asking. Is it all show and no go? I put both my old drive and my new drive through some benchmarks for comparison.
Sep 20, 2011 by Paul White

After getting our last bill from Comcast, I decided that I really don't need Cable or Phone. After all both my wife and I have cell phones with unlimited talk, and even though we do occasionally watch TV, the quality of entertainment in my opinion has gone to crap. I was able to shave $80 off my Comcast Bill, by keeping the internet only and buying my own DOCSIS 3.0 modem to avoid their $7 / month rental fee.
Nov 19, 2010 by Paul White

So I finally have made the move to SSD. Unlike many who went with a single SSD drive I went with an SSD raid 0 Array. Using 3 OCZ Vertex 2 60 GB SSD drives, I setup a RAID 0 array on my ASUS P6T Deluxe Motherboard's built in Intel ICH10R SATA controller. The benchmarks were outstanding. Maybe I could have gotten a little better performance from using a dedicated RAID card, but 700 MB/sec read and write is good enough for me.
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Nov 17, 2010 by Paul White
During my quest to upgrade my computer from my 4 disk SAS raid array to a 3 disk SSD raid array, I had a few learning experiences with the windows 7 backup and restore system. Hopefully my tips will help others.
Apr 12, 2010 by Paul White

I guess SSD drives have finally caught the eye of the joe average consumers, because the other day a client of mine called asking if they should upgrade to an SSD drive. So I went about explaining to him the difference between traditional platter based storage hard drives and SSD ( Solid State Drives ). Then I got to think that my explanation might be better suited for a blog entry. So here it is.
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Mar 27, 2010 by Paul White

After making several upgrades to my workstation over the last 6 months, my old Tripp Lite OMNI1000LCD just wasn't cutting it anymore. So it was time to upgrade to a UPS that would be able to stay on for more than 5 seconds. I upgraded to the SMART1500LCD by Tripp lite. Its an older model, but it handles 1500 VA and 900 Watts peak. Of course whenever you buy a UPS off ebay especially a used one, you can expect a few surprises.
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Feb 5, 2010 by Paul White

Recently I decided to add some hot swap trays to my system. I searched for quite a while before I found trays that would maintain my personal sense of style ( Bling ), and have functionality as well. I went with the Vantec Trays that include a blue LCD display giving you temperature stats on the drives. Overall I am very happy with my decision, though Vantec could have done a slightly better job with these.
Feb 5, 2010 by Paul White

I knew I was going to make the switch to Windows 7, but I wanted to make a few upgrades before I did this. These upgrades included hot swap trays for my SATA drives, and extending my SAS RAID array from 2 drives to 4 drives. However this forced me to get a Dedicated RAID controller, as the ASUS board only supports two SAS drives. On this blog I will focus on the SAS RAID upgrade using the Adaptec 4805SAS RAID card and 4 x 15K RPM Fujitsu SAS Hard Drives.
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Nov 15, 2009 by Paul White
If you are thinking about getting a dedicated server with Godaddy because of their cheap prices, I understand. But how far will their server really take you? After dealing with performance issues with godaddy with another client, I build my own server and colocated it. Then I did some benchmarks comparing the two. Huge difference. Click read to see the bench marks.
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Oct 17, 2009 by Paul White

Even though I will be running remote backups, I wanted to make sure I had a little more redundancy than just RAID 10 and remote backups. So I took it upon myself to figure out how to cram an extra hard drive into an already crowded Server. This 1U rack server already has 4 x 3.5" hard drives. Now lets see if we can cram a small laptop hard drive into this for a in the box backup storage medium.