Happy Bison

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...