Background Openfiler had been serving me reliably for about four years but had begun to seriously slow down as my media pool grew. My project of ripping all my DVDs and BluRays to the pool had slowly increased the pool size. The data was spread across three independent drives in the server (I don’t use […]
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 […]
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, […]
Introduction During the previous post I described my CD-to-FLAC project. The purpose of that project is two-fold: 1) create a digital, loss-less backup of all our existing CD collection, and 2) be able to access this mountain of media and play it on our main stereo system. I was already looking to possibly replace my […]
My project the last several weeks has been to rip my CD collection to FLAC. This is so I have electronic backups of all my music, as well as to allow it to be easily played on the sound systems in the house. My previous post described how I set about ripping. This post will […]
