Review

I am sharing my experiences and first impressions of the Zotac ZBOXHD-ID11-U mini PC. In the coming days I will connect the device to my home theater, and review the behavior running Windows Media Center, XBMC, and Media-Portal. This is the first post in a series of posts related to the Zotac ZBOX ZBOXHD-ID11. Summary: - To enter the BIOS, cold boot and press DEL. - To select a boot device, cold boot and press F11. - To enable Aero, run the Windows Experience Index assessment. - To improve performance, install updated drivers from the hardware vendor site. - To correct HDMI audio output, install updated drivers from the hardware vendor site. - To reduce fan noise, change the BIOS temperature thresholds. - The fan is loud and the box runs hot. ...

I previously wrote about my impressions of the DroboPro, and in case I was not clear, I was not impressed. I recently read the announcement of the new QNAP TS-859 Pro, and from the literature it seemed like a great device, high performance, feature rich, and power saving. The TS-859 Pro is now available, and I compared it with the DroboPro, and against a regular W2K8R2 file server. ...

I recently replaced my DELL monitors with NEC monitors. The primary reason why I replaced DELL with NEC is color reproduction, I could never quite get the wide gamut DELL’s to look right. I chose the NEC MultiSync 90 series monitors because they have excellent color reproduction, and are reasonably affordable. The alternative would have been EIZO ColorEdge monitors, but they are significantly more expensive. Since I had a hard time calibrating the wide color gamut DELL monitors in the past, it was very important that the NEC monitors be correctly calibrated. ...

I recently built a new home theater PC using an Intel DP45SG motherboard and a Lian-Li PC-C33B case. I am replacing my existing HTPC that appears to be not quite compatible with Windows 7. The existing machine uses a Lian-Li PC-C31B case, Intel DG33TL motherboard, and ATI Sapphire HD 2600XT video card. I started documenting the new machine installation, but the new case was on backorder, and I had all components except the new case, so I tried the HD 5750 card in the old machine. ...

In this post I am describing, and partly reviewing, my experience using a DroboPro over iSCSI. I have been aware of the Drobo storage devices for some time now, but never used one or knew anybody that owned one. Recently a coworker’s large home RAID system had a controller failure, and after recovering the data, he migrated to a DroboPro using iSCSI. After he told me how quiet the device is, and how little power it uses, I wanted to try one out myself. ...

In my previous post I talked about Western Digital RE4-GP 2TB drive problems. In this post I present my test results for 2TB drives from Seagate and Hitachi. The test setup is the same as for the RE4-GP testing, except that I only tested 4 drives from each manufacturer. Unlike the enterprise class WD RE4-GP and Hitachi Ultrastar A7K2000 drives, the Seagate Barracuda LP drive is a desktop drive. The equivalent should have been a Seagate Constellation ES drive, but as far as I know the 2TB drives are not yet available. ...

This post continues from my last post on power saving RAID controllers. It turns out the Adaptec 5 series controllers are not that workstation friendly. I was testing with Western Digital drives; 1TB Caviar Black WD1001FALS, 2TB Caviar Green WD20EADS, and 1TB RE3 WD1002FBYS. I also wanted to test with the new 2TB RE4-GP WD2002FYPS drives, but they are on backorder. I found that the Caviar Black WD1001FALS and Caviar Green WD20EADS drives were just dropping out of the array for no apparent reason, yet they were still listed in ASM as if nothing was wrong. ...

I upgraded my vista Ultimate x64 workstation to a dual monitor setup using two 24"DELL 2408WFP displays connected to an ATI HD4850 video card. I immediately noticed that the colors were unnaturally bright and over-saturated. I had a similar problem on another workstation with a 30"DELL 3007WFP-HC display. My original 3007WFP was great, until it started making a high pitched noise, and DELL replaced it under warranty, but they replaced it with a 3007WFP-HC model, and the color difference was very noticeably worse than the old monitor. ...

I’ve been a longtime user of Adaptec SATA RAID cards (3805, 5805, 51245), but over the years I’ve become more energy saving conscious, and the Adaptec controllers did not support Windows power management. My workstations are normally running in the “Balanced” power mode so that they will go to sleep after an hour, but sometimes I need to run computationally intensive tasks that leave the machines running 24/7. During these periods the disks don’t need to be on and I want the disks to spin down, like they would had they been directly connected and not in a RAID configuration. ...

In the ongoing saga to get a motherboard that works well with Vista SP1 going to sleep, I have yet again switched motherboards. As previously posted I’ve tried an Intel DG33TL board, and an Intel DQ35JO, and I am now using an Asus P5E-VM HDMI board. I was happy with the Intel DQ35JO, but this did not last very long. A few days after posting I found my machine with garbage characters on the screen, requiring a cold boot. Intel support was of little help, but a few days later I updated the firmware on my ThinkPad T61, and I read that one of the fixes in the firmware was to fix garbage characters on the screen when sleeping or resuming from sleep caused by the AMT feature. The DQ35JO board also has AMT, so maybe that was the same problem. ...