About may of last year, I built a server for myself, in hopes of centralizing all the storage drives of my house to one constantly on box and simplifying access to files across the four computers on my network. And sure enough, a couple of hours and hundred dollars later I had myself a kick-arse server rig which housed a RAID1 array for my personal use as well as 3 other random storage drives on which the members of my family could store their music, videos and pictures.

Everybody knows that we, members of OCN, have a serious problem. Look at it from an average Joe perspective: we spend thousands on high end computers, and at every single occasion we go out and browse Newegg on a quest to find an upgrade for our systems, which according to us are quickly becoming obsolete. We then proceed to sell our memory, processors, graphic cards and all our other barely used gear, things which are sometimes only a couple of weeks old, in order to purchase the latest and greatest. While the common mortals still call a Pentium 4 HT/P965/7900GX2 system a top gaming machine, we constantly crave for more, more performance, more 3dMarks, smaller SuperPI times, and bigger e-peens. And after spending 50$ on Crysis:Warhead in order to be able to run the benchmark tool, we sit our asses on the chairs and play CS:S at framerates exceeding by 6 times our monitor's refresh rates. We are hardware junkies, hung on PCB like a druggy is on PCP. 

Probably my best piece of to now. I spill my guts on what I think of the new Intel platform that features the new Core i7 processors and x58 motherboards. Read the entire article with feedback from the Overclock.net community here.

Every since I’ve joined twitter back almost two years ago in March of 07, I’ve been tweeting on a regular basis. I love Twitter not only because it’s a great place to dump all the thoughts and reasonings that are too short or stupid to blog about, but also because when one logs what he/she is doing on Twitter, there is no telling what follower will reply, and what kind of conversation will ensue. In that sense, I think of Twitter not only as microblogging, but also as a great big open SMS conversation. Thanks to my followers, I’ve found tons of new sites, and equal amount of funny/interesting videos, and shared tons with lots of interesting people.

If you've been following hardware news for the last 2 years, you may have notice some of the many trends that are becoming the new hotness in computing. As always the race for price/performance between Intel and AMD is on, the two giants along with Nvidia are releasing new flagship products, core shrink remixes almost every month. That's nothing new... But other hot topics are also shaking up the hardware world, namely more and more parallelized computing via multi-core CPUs, GP-GPUs and GPU acceleration, the growing presence of DDR3 in high performance systems, and something which I think is really special, the hype over smaller, cheaper, more power efficient computers, the topic of this article. 

Disk redundancy is something that I’ve been wanting in my home server for quite a while now, and since I now make (relatively) huge paychecks for working somewhere else than McDonalds, I thought that with the traditional HDD’s prices plumetting because of the increasinly competitive SSD segment taking over, it might be a good time to invest in some RAID1 for protection. I took a deep breath, swiped my debit care, and 200 dollars later I was the pround owner of two Seagate 7200.11 500 gig drives.