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Windows 8 News: Exciting News On Network Support, File Systems, and PC Repair

January 24th, 2012
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It’s been awhile since we covered the announcements coming out of the Building Windows 8 blog and there have been a number of interesting new articles published. We’ve got three of the biggest discussed below:

New Network Management:

Windows 7 made connecting to a WiFi network easy, but managing a 3G connection can be more troublesome. As Billy Anders writes, “you needed to locate and install third-party device drivers, and in some cases software, before ever getting your first connection. If the drivers for your device and software from your mobile operator were not available locally, you had to find another connection type (perhaps Wi-Fi) to the Internet to search for software on the websites of the PC maker or mobile operator.”

Windows 8 aims to change that. The OS will ship with a generalized broadband driver based on the Mobile Broadband Interface Mobile (MBIM) standard. MBIM isn’t proprietary–it was developed by the USB-IF–and it supports both 3G and 4G, including LTE. As part of its expanded support for wireless radios, the OS also includes a comprehensive monitor/control screen where users can view information about connections and turn radios on and off.

Other features include a drastically shortened reconnect time, the ability to switch from carrier to carrier on the fly, and the option to monitor bandwidth usage across both WiFi and 3G. The OS can also be configured to prefer one type of connection over another to avoid overage charges, and to warn you when approaching a preset limit.

NTFS Evolved: Meet ReFS:

ReFS (Resilient File System) is the new storage system built into Windows 8, and it’s designed to provide a number of features that guarantee data integrity as well as a highly visible change to how system storage is organized.

ReFS maintains data reliability through the use of checksums that are maintained independently from the data they’re attached to. This allows the OS to detect all forms of data corruption. Because ReFS uses a new allocate-on-write strategy for updating file metadata rather than writing it directly, there’s virtually no chance that a power loss will result in an unrecoverable corrupted file.

The major visible change is Windows 8’s concept of Storage Spaces. Some of you may remember that Microsoft’s Windows Home Server OS from several years ago had a feature called Drive Extender that allowed customers to expand the total storage pool available to the OS just by plugging in additional drives, without any need for formatting or letter assignments. Storage Spaces extends that concept and amps it up significantly.

Users can create a storage space using any type or configuration of storage from USB sticks to old IDE hard drives. Once a space is created, the data within it can be safeguarded RAID-style using mirroring, parity+mirroring, or both — all within the same contiguous block of hard drives. The OS also supports thin provisioning, which means that the total space allocated to a given project can be larger than the amount of total storage available at any given point.

The one downside is that drives / devices added to the pool aren’t bootable, though MS says its working on fix.

Data Restoration:

Finally, there’s the question of data backup / restoration. The concept of an “overtop” or repair installation has existed since at least Windows 98, but there’s never been a foolproof method of ensuring that the process will actually solve the problem. Microsoft added the concept of “Restore Points,” years ago, but while these can resolve certain kinds of problems, it’s far from a bulletproof solution.

Windows 8 splits OS repair into two categories — Reset and Refresh. A reset is exactly what it sounds like — the OS is restored to full factory defaults and all personal data/information is removed. A refresh involves the following steps:

* Windows RE (Recovery Environment) scans the hard drive for your data, settings, and apps, and puts them aside
* (on the same drive).
* Windows RE installs a fresh copy of Windows.
* Windows RE restores the data, settings, and apps it has set aside into the newly installed copy of Windows.
* The PC restarts into the newly installed copy of Windows.

Microsoft is still deciding exactly which settings should be copied, given that certain issues may have been caused by problems in a users’ saved settings.

According to internal benchmarks, it takes 8 minutes, 22 seconds to ‘Refresh’ a system and as little as 6 minutes to reset it if BitLocker is enabled (using BitLocker allows the system to wipe the drive by erasing encrypted metadata).

Windows, Reimagined:

The number of changes coming in the next version of Windows is staggering. Windows 8’s non-x86 support and Metro UI have gotten a great deal of attention, but it’s increasingly clear that Metro, while vital, is only one component of the new operating system.

We’re still concerned about Microsoft’s long-term plans for desktop users and the company’s decision to require ARM devices to ship with a locked bootloader, but there are a lot of core improvements coming. It’s clear that Microsoft sat down to rethink every aspect of system usage rather than simply slapping on a UI overhaul. At the risk of sounding hyperbolic, this really might be the company’s biggest launch since Windows 95.

Source:http://hothardware.com/News/Windows-8-News-Exciting-News-On-Network-Support-File-Systems-and-PC-Repair/

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OWC Jupiter miniSAS and 480GB PCIe RAID

January 20th, 2012
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OWC’s fast Mac storage takes SSDs out of the MacBook and into shared systems.

Other World Computing is best known for swap-out SSDs using fast Toshiba flash memory that speed up Macs, with unusually long guarantees (seven years). The new Aura Envoy USB 3 aluminium enclosure that comes with its MacBook Air SSD replacement is a thin sloping wedge that lines up nicely with the Air case, so you can reuse the disk you replace as a stylish external drive. Apple doesn’t yet have a machine with USB 3 ports, but they’re expected in Ivy Bridge-based systems.

The Aura Pro replacement modules OWC offers for the Air now go up to 480GB and they’re the faster 6Gpbs SATA connection that the newwest Airs support (even though Apple is still supplying slower 3Gbps storage itself). The 480GB module will be available at the end of the month, for $1,149.

Now the company is branching out into more powerful storage systems, still with a Mac flavour.

Particularly interesting is its Jupiter mini-SAS hub. SAS is the enterprise equivalent of SATA and a single mini-SAS connection gives you speeds of up to 24Gbps; that’s fast data sharing that’s not much more complex than direct-attached drives – you don’t need the infrastructure of a storage area network or the high cost of fibre channel to get large amounts of fast, shared storage. OWC CEO Larry O’Connor estimates that mini-SAS is a quarter of the price of fibre channel and three times faster (24 rather than 8Gbps) and it’s flexible too.

You can fill a Jupiter with SAS or SATA drives, configured a RAID 0, 1, 5, 6, 10, 50, 60 – or ‘just a bunch of disks’ which would work well for Windows 8 Server’s new Storage Spaces. You can start with a tower that has 4TB in – around $5,000 with the associated PCIe cards and cables for four workstations – and scale all the way up to 3.6PB by connecting more Jupiter systems together.

The mini-SAS connector can plug in to a mini-SAS PCI Express card in a Mac Pro or PC server, or you can attach it via the 9-port hub to share the storage between 8 workstations or connect multiple Jupiter systems with an LSI switch. Connect 8 workstations through a 9-port hub and each of them gets 24Gbps bandwidth; connect two channels with two cables and you can get 48Gbps. The management software lets you zone specific drives to specific servers or workstations, or pool the storage for general use.

If you want to max out a single computer with fast storage, OWC’s planned PCI-Express card has embedded RAID using the Marvell 88SE9445 SATA 6Gb/s RAID controller for its four 480GB flash drives (although options go from 60GB to 2TB on the card and you don’t have to fill all the mPCIE slots so you can start small and expand). O’Connor showed us the prototype card and claimed this is the first PCI Express SSD for Macs. Use that with RAID 0 for pooling the drives and you get sustained throughput of 2Gbps – which means you can do video editing of the largest files without interruptions. Because it’s software RAID you won’t be able to boot from the card, so OWC is planning a bootable 8-bay hardware RAID model later this year, which will still deliver around 1Gbps.

Source:http://www.zdnet.co.uk/blogs/zdnet-uk-first-take-10013312/ces-2012-owc-jupiter-minisas-and-480gb-pcie-raid-10025248/

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New HyperDuo-Powered SATA Controller from Marvell Super Charges Your Storage Scheme

January 10th, 2012
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Marvell is doing some magnificent things in the storage space lately. Hot on the heels of co-developing the “Kilimanjaro” native PCIe to NAND flash controller platform with OCZ (demonstrated via OCZ’s new Z-Drive R5, which we covered the announcement here), Marvell on Monday unveiled its 88SE9230 6Gbps SATA controller powered by HyperDuo embedded processor technology.

This new controller replaces Marvell’s previous one and offers twice the performance, capacity, and scalability as before. What’s neat about this controller is that it supports up to four ports for SSD and HDD connectivity, and if you hook up both kinds of drives, it will intelligently manage your data so that you receive up to 80 percent of the performance of your SSD while leveraging 100 percent of your HDD. Sound familiar? It’s essentially a hybrid storage solution, but at the chipset level and with a few tricks up its sleeve, like on-the-fly 128/256-bit AES encryption and RAID support.

Configured with one hard drive and multiple SSDs, HyperDuo uses intelligent algorithms to automatically migrate hot data to the SSD while enabling all data to be safely stored on a larger capacity SATA SSD for higher input/output operations per second (IOPS), throughput, and capacity, Marvell explains. “The Marvell 88SE9235 can be used for embedded platform applications such as home NAS/media servers, DVR/NVR, and set-top boxes, or by HBA vendors to develop their own RAID software or in-box OS drivers.”

Source:http://hothardware.com/News/New-HyperDuoPowered-SATA-Controller-from-Marvell-Super-Charges-Your-Storage-Scheme/

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Biostar Announces TPOWER X79 Motherboard with Gusto

December 30th, 2011
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Biostar this week rolled out its new TPOWER X79 motherboard, which is apparently “the most powerful motherboard on the planet” (Biostar’s words, not ours). Part of the reason Biostar is marketing its motherboard as such is due to its “extreme overclocking” capabilities, a notion that might have seemed silly coming from Biostar a few short years ago when the focus was primarily on budget boards, but not so much after the company racked up several overclocking records.

Getting down to the nitty-gritty, the new TPOWER X79 boasts a 9-phase power design, 100 percent solid capacitors, a 2-ounce copper PCB, 8-layer PCB, dual 8-pin EPS connectors, USB 3.0 support, four DDR3 memory slots with support for up to 32GB of DDR3-2400 (OC) memory, three PCI-E x16 3.0 slots, two PCI-E x1 2.0 slots, a single legacy PCI slot, four SATA 6Gbps ports, three SATA 3Gbps ports, a single eSATA 3Gbps connectors, support for RAID 0/1/5/10, AMD 4-way CrossFireX and Nvidia 3-way SLI support, and a whole bunch of other odds and ends.

There’s also a Debug LED indicating lamp, buttons for booting, and a clear CMOS button, all of which are handy for hardcore overclocking and testing.

Source:http://hothardware.com/News/Biostar-Announces-TPOWER-X79-Motherboard-with-Gusto/

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Sonnet’s Fusion F2QR Portable RAID Storage Solution On Sale For $569

October 3rd, 2011
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We’ve been big fans of innovation in storage for, well, ever. It’s usually the bottleneck in modern day systems, and with the advent of NAND / SSD / DRAM, things have been moving in the right direction. But coming up with the perfect solution using what’s on the market today is still tough; options are somewhat limited, and prices are typically sky-high. But it’s things like Sonnet’s Fusion F2QR that bring smiles to our faces. This is a portable 2-drive hardware RAID SATA Storage System with a quad-interface. In short, it’s a really unique, really awesome piece of kit.

The handheld package is made of aluminum, and includes side-by-side drives. It’s only as thick as two CD jewel cases stacked atop one another, and inside you’ll find two 2.5″ 1TB HDDs. It’s based on the Fusion F2, a portable two-drive RAID SATA storage system, but this one adds a built-in hardware RAID controller for configuring the drives, a quad interface enabling connection to almost any computer, and a greater storage capacity. A built-in high performance RAID controller manages Fusion F2QR’s drives and supports RAID 0 (fast), RAID 1 (safe), concatenated (span) and even JBOD (Just a Bunch of Disks) configurations, so you can choose the setup that best suits your needs. Whether you choose RAID 0 for the best performance, RAID 1 for a mirrored backup of your data, or JBOD to work with more audio tracks, changing the drive configuration is simple using included configuration application software. The application also provides information on the health of the drives when they’ve been configured as a RAID 1 set.

his portable storage system features a quad interface that requires just a single data cable to connect the enclosure to an eSATA host controller card for the fastest data transfers possible—this efficient interface simplifies setup and cuts cable clutter without compromising performance. No SATA? No problem—connected via a single FireWire 800, FireWire 400, or USB 2.0 cable, the drives can be accessed at the full speed of the respective interface. Sonnet even includes all the cables so you can connect your Fusion storage system right out of the box.

It’s available now if you’re intrigued, but it’ll set you back $569.

Source:http://hothardware.com/News/Sonnets-Fusion-F2QR-Portable-RAID-Storage-Solution-On-Sale-For-569/

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AMD Has No Plans to Intro Brand-Names for “Ontario” and “Zacate” Hybrid Chips.

December 9th, 2010
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Advanced Micro Devices does not plan to give a special brand-name to its code-named Ontario and Zacate accelerated processing units (APUs) with x86 and graphics engines in the same chip, but will instead market the new chips under already established “Vision” technology brand. The decision seems be a yet another response to the trend of the so-called platformization in the PC industry.

“Ontario and Zacate will come to market under the ‘AMD Vision Technology’ brand,” said Godfrey Cheng, the director of client technology unit at AMD, in an interview with X-bit labs.

For many years AMD as well as its larger rival Intel sold their central processing units (CPUs) under certain brand-names so to show differences between them within their own lineups and associate all the pleasant consumer experience with those brands, such as Athlon or Pentium. But in the recent years the situation on the markets changed drastically: people ceased to associate microprocessor brands with experiences since their visual experience depended on performance of graphics adapters and quality of computer screens.

In order to show benefits of its set of technologies, AMD introduced Vision brand in 2009 that divided systems powered by AMD’s chips into several classes, based on performance of ingredients. For example, Vision Premium-labeled notebooks represent the best-of-the-best that AMD-based mobile systems can offer.

Inside AMD Vision-branded machines there are Athlon-, Phenom-, Sempron- or Turion-branded microprocessors. But inside next-generation systems powered by the Brazos platform with the first-generation Ontario and Zacate inside, accelerated processing units themselves will not have a name; instead, they will carry one of AMD’s Vision platforms logotypes that will determine their performance and feature levels.

AMD Brazos platform for desktops and mobile computers will consist of AMD Fusion accelerated processing unit (APU) code-named Ontario/Zacate (featuring one or two x86 cores based on Bobcat micro-architecture as well as a DirectX 11 and OpenCL-compliant graphics engine) in addition to code-named Hudson D1 fusion controller hub, which will connect to processor using PCI Express 2.0 x4 bus and will support 4 PCIe x1 ports, PCI bus, 6 Serial ATA-300 ports, 14 USB 2.0 ports as well as integrated clock-generator. The part does not support RAID, Gigabit Ethernet and other capabilities.

Source:http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/cpu/display/20101208162203_AMD_Has_No_Plans_to_Intro_Brand_Names_for_Ontario_and_Zacate_Hybrid_Chips.html

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Smooth Creations “Goliath” Core i7-980X Custom Gaming PC

November 22nd, 2010
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Introduction

Based in White City, Oregon, Smooth Creations sells built-to-order gaming PCs and is known for its high-quality custom paint jobs. Last month we reviewed the HD 5970-equipped, Phenom X6-based, “Battlefield: Bad Company 2” custom gaming rig.

This month we review that system’s big brother; the aptly named “Goliath.”

Let’s take a look!

All Smooth Creations systems are built-to-order and available only through Smoothcreations.com. The company is, in the full sense of the term, a custom builder.

Although the company’s website showcases a few models and offers several options on the configuration pages, the company seems to prefer you call them up and talk to one of their reps to discuss options for a new system.

One of the main selling points for the company’s systems is the free custom case paint, and it probably is in the customer’s best interest to discuss what is and isn’t feasible in that regard with an actual person.

The website also emphasizes that Smooth Creations chassis’ are meant to last well beyond a single hardware-obsolescence cycle.

When you’re ready for a new computer, send your chassis back to the company for a free interior cleaning and a buff and polish of the artwork. Then they’ll build a new system to your specs in your existing chassis.

While that might at first seem a bit gimmicky, take a look at the custom chassis’ Smooth Creations offers, and you’ll soon recognize that they are works of art unto themselves.

These aren’t just off-the-shelf cases with a coat of auto paint on them. They’re functional art designed by an in-house team of artists and engineers.

Check out Smooth Creations’ Youtube channel as well as its web gallery for a sampling of various chassis art. We particularly liked this one.

The Goliath contains some of the best hardware available on the market today. Built on an ASUS Rampage III x58 LGA 1366 motherboard, the builder overclocked the Intel i7 980 processor from its stock speed of 3.33GHz all the way up to 4.5GHz.

An elaborate liquid cooling scheme comprised of parts from Koolance and Danger Den makes such extreme overclocking possible. A pair of AMD HD 5970 video cards (4 GPUs total) in CrossfireX provides some serious framerates.

The rest of the hardware compliment includes 12GB of Corsair Dominator GT 2000MHz RAM, a Lite-On Blu-ray burner, and a 1200 watt(!) Corsair AX power supply.

An Aerocool Power Panel mounted on the front of the chassis displays component temperatures and provides controls for the system’s numerous cooling fans.

The hard drives consist of two 256GB Western Digital Silicon Edge SSDs in RAID 0 and two 2TB Western Digital Caviar Green 7200RPM drives in RAID 1.

For an in-depth discussion of the different RAID configurations, see here. Basically, RAID 0 provides faster read/write times by having two separate disks act as one, allowing data to be read/written in parallel at each disk’s maximum rate, and splitting the data between the pair.

RAID 1 is your garden-variety data mirroring for protection in case one of the drives fail, hence the acronym for Redundant Array of Independent Disks. We’ll talk more about the benefits of this configuration in the “General Usage” section of the review.

As configured, this system goes for approximately $6990 USD as of November 2010.

Source:http://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/3665/smooth_creations_goliath_core_i7_980x_custom_gaming_pc/

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