I have a Zotac ZBOX, which has been a wonderful little device. The Dual-core Atom within is not the most powerful of processors but the Ion graphics chip more than makes up for the CPU’s shortcomings. XBMC Live 10.0 runs on the machine and really maximizes the machine’s capabilities. A while back I ran some […]
The past two months I have been working on cleaning up the home network and streamlining my backup processes. Anyone who has accumulated PCs and hard drives over time knows that data creep can overburden your network. I used to split drives into a number of partitions to keep data segregated. Over time some partitions […]
Background I had been successfully backing up to a NFS Datastore on my backup server running XP for the past year. Hardware issues began to crop up on the server (which was a hodgepodge of parts, most of which were at least seven years old) which necessitated a rebuild. A new motherboard, CPU and 8GB […]
This week I stumbled upon a technology that was new to me: AoE, or ATA over Ethernet. This protocol was being hyped as a faster, much cheaper alternative to iSCSCI and NFS. In a nutshell, AoE “is a network protocol, designed for simple, high-performance access of SATA devices over Ethernet”.  I found a short description […]
The last several posts have described my foray into HTPC territory. My XBMC Live installation is humming along nicely on the Zotac ZBOX HD-ND02, and we are thoroughly enjoying it. Although the installation of XBMC Live was quick and painless, I have made quite a few changes to the skin settings, media paths, SSD settings, […]
I have a Kingston SSDNow S100 SS100S2/16G 2.5″ 16GB SATA II Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) in my home theater PC. Although this was my first actual taste of a SSD, I understood that TRIM must be enabled on the drive to keep it performing smoothly for the long haul. Otherwise it would gradually decline […]
