Today I tried out installing Windows Server 2008 on my cube server. When I reached the dialog to choose on which partition I want to install to, I always received the following warning "windows is unable to find a system volume that meets its criteria for installation". The partition had enough room space (40GB), formatted in NTFS, marked as primary and boot, etc.

After some research I ended up to the following article (KB927520). I tried a lot in the BIOS and partition settings but nothing helped. On the TechNet forum I saw the following thread with the same error and most of them solved the problem by physically unplugging all additional drives! On my cube I have an Areca RAID controller and a separated drive for booting the system. Unplugging my raid controller was the solution, duh!

Last week, I purchased a Linksys WRT54GL at RouterShop.nl. The service at Routershop.nl was really fast: at around 1:00pm I created the order and it was delivered the very next day!

The big advantage of WRT54GL is that you can upgrade the firmware of the device. Some popular firmware's are DD-WRT, OpenWRT and Tomato. I am using Tomato, of which today a new version has been released, i.e. Tomato 1.09. Tomato has a very nice interface, many interesting features and great-looking graphs. Below you will find a nice graph concerning the bandwidth:

Note that you need to install the Adobe SVG Viewer in order to view the graphs.

Last week I bought an external harddisk, Vantec Nexstar 3 (NST-360SU-BK), that can be connected through USB 2.0 and eSata. eSata is simply a new standard for connecting external SATA drives at full speed! I use the external harddisk to share data between my laptop (through USB 2.0) and my desktop PC (through eSata). I use extensively Virtual PC for development, and it's a good thing when developing on my desktop PC I can use the full speed of my HD. 

Recently I have a new LCD monitor, the Samsung 204B. It's a 20.1 inch LCD monitor, with a resolution of 1600 x 1200 and a response time of 5 ms.

I am freak when it comes to monitors. I like to have a high resolution and the quality of the screen must be perfect. My current monitor is a Sony F520 (CRT), which is very expensive,  but it has a resolution of 2048 x 1536@86Hz and a pitch of 0.22mm. Therefore I was afraid about the quality of the Samsung 204B compared with my CRT monitor.

In one word, the quality is superb of the Samsung. The colors are vivid and the text is very clear (no ghosting or blur). No dead pixels found, has an ergonomic 4-way adjustable stand and I like the design very much. One more detail, it's about 50 pounds (23 kg) lighter than my current CRT monitor :)

Modern GPUs are increasing in programmability and these chips can do more than just graphical computations. They can now be used as a coprocessor, and they can be integrated for a set of tasks. GPGPU (General-Purpose compuation on GPUs) is such an initiative that contains a catalog where the GPU can be used for general-purpose computation.

The big challenge, is to translate the everyday applications to two-dimensional graphic functions, like texture mapping. In other words: Pretend that everything is a game (source). 

As an example in this article and results, a quicksort algorithm of 18 million records in Visual C++ took 21 seconds, while the GPU took 2 seconds! What are the results for a Quad SLI setup?

Microsoft research is apparently working on a system that simplifies the programming of GPU to general-purpose tasks, it's called Accelerator (simplified programming of graphics processing units for general-purpose uses via data-parallelism).

For a long time I was thinking about purchasing a portable GPS device and I also wanted to replace my old GSM. One of the most popular devices is TomTom Go, but I felt it would be better to integrate both into a smartphone. TomTom also has a product called TomTom Mobile 5 that allows GPS navigation on your smartphone.

Therefore I bought the Qtek 8310 and TomTom Mobile 5 at PDAshop.be, I picked up the Navigation pack. The installation was easy, the only thing I had to do was to upgrade the TomTom software to TomTom Mobile 5.2 which can be found here, so that the software supports the Qtek 8310 which is the same as the i-mate sp5 (this must be chosen in the product upgrade). The TomTom package includes a mini-SD card which contains the TomTom software and maps that can be inserted into the smartphone.

I have to admit that everything works perfectly, the software is identically to the TomTom Go devices, there are no speed issues and the screen resolution is more than sufficient. Until now I didn't encounter any problems.

The smartphone itself has many many features, one of them is:

• OS: Microsoft Windows Mobile
• Quad-band GSM/GPRS / EDGE module
• GPRS functionality
• 1.3 Mega Pixels CMOS
• Mini-USB plug (Slave USB, Power In)
• Infrared IrDA SIR
• miniSD Card slot
• Bluetooth
• WiFi
• ActiveSync
• MSN Messenger, IE, etc.
• ...

And most importantly you can write .NET applications for your smartphone. If you download the Windows Mobile 5.0 SDK for Smartphone you get extra templates inside Visual Studio 2005 for writing smartphone applications.

Update:

• Using the i-mate SP5 with Visual Studio 2005
• Alert - Security permission was insufficient to update your device

This year I purchased a server for persisting my data and for running applications that require intensive processing. For me it was very important to have a robust & performant way for archiving my data. Therefore I purchased a RAID card from Areca, the ARC-1120 . The raid card is connected through 8 HD's of 200GB from Western Digital in RAID 5. Areca is currently one of the best RAID cards available. This page contains an extended review with benchmarks .

My initial idea was to use my current ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe motherboard, which has 2x PCI-E Express ports, and to use one port for the RAID controller. At that time it was still not possible, but now ASUS has provided a new BIOS driver which fixes the issue. After a lot of research and certainly the many chats I had with Bruno, I decided to go for a server motherboard. This is simply the most recommended way and is more robust, uses registered memory, has PCI-X ports, dual CPU, more memory slots, etc.

I wanted a server motherboard that contains dual CPU core support and featuring one or two PCI-E ports. This way I can easily upgrade in the future if it is necessary. Therefore I purchased the Tyan K8WE, which is an NForce Pro based server motherboard with 2x PCI Express x16 slots @full speed x16 lanes and has even a firewire connection.

A lot of hardware components means a large case. Therefore I decided to buy the U2-UFO case from Mountainmods. It's really a case with a lot of space and most important it can contain up to 9 HD's and it's compatible with an Extended ATX motherboard.

I am still configuring the server, but I will certainly post some benchmarks and experiences. In the mean time you can find the specs and some pictures of my server.

• U2-UFO Black Powder Coat - Original Top
• Tyan K8WE
• 2 x AMD Opteron 244
• 4 x OCZ 512MB DDRPC-3200 Server Series
• OCZ PowerStream 600 watt
• Areca 1120 Raid Card
• 8 x Western Digital WD2000JD 150MB/s
• 1 x Western Digital WD2000JS 300MB/s
• Plextor 716A CD-R & DVD±R Recorder
• 2 x Akasa Fan Controller AK-FC-03
• 7 x ACE 120 mm Crystal Clear 2 BallBearing Special 4 Leds Blue
• 2 x CoolerMaster Neon LED Fan RED 120x120mm
  

Recently I purchased a new computer and I wanted to setup a RAID5 on 4x SATA Western Digital 200GB's. The motherboard is from Asus, the A8N SLI Deluxe which has 2 SATA controllers, the Silicon Image 3114R and NForce4. I also purchased a WD Raptor as boot disk which is connected to the NVRaid because it supports NCQ and the SI3114R not.

First of all I wanted to test if my raptor was faster than a normal 7200 rpm HD. And thankfully this was the case, it was about 10MB/s faster.

RAPTOR 74GB

7200RPM 200GB

After that I tested some RAID (0, 1, 10) configurations on the SI3114 controller. One thing was clear, that mirroring on the SI3114 isn't optimized for reading, it's even a little bit slower than reading from a single disk. This has also been confirmed in a review (images are broken) from xbitlabs, where they also conclude that it doesn't have any optimizations for mirrored arrays, but focuses on RAID0. As you can see from the benchmarks there is no performance gain in RAID 1 (left below image) against a single disk (right up image), and RAID10 performs like a RAID0.

RAID 1 STRIPE 64

RAID 10 STRIPE 64

So, the SI3114 was not an option for me. Then I looked for setting up a software raid in Windows XP. Yes indeed, you can build a RAID 5 in Windows XP after doing a little hack . For more information check out the article at tomshardware named Using WindowsXP to Make RAID 5 Happen.

Here I did a benchmark with a stripe size of 0.5 (default) and 64K. As you can see this gives a big difference.

RAID 5 STRIPE 0.5

RAID 5 STRIPE 64

From the benchmarks with default stripe size I conclude that the read performance of RAID5 is about the same compared to a single disk, but the write performance is about the half of a single disk. This solution did not satisfy for me, because the performance is not what I expected, consumes CPU and I don't like the idea that I had to enable it by hacking some DLLs in Windows and there were some issues with Service Pack 2.

Therefore I concluded to buy a PCI-Express SATA Raid controller, namely the Areca 1220. The Areca RAID controllers perform very well and include all the RAID features you need. A very detailed review with a lot of benchmarks can be found here.

The ASUS A8N SLI Deluxe does have 2x 8xPCI-Express ports, which can be used for example for one VGA card and a RAID card, it doesn't need to be 2 VGA cards. To be sure I sended an email to Asus to ask if the Areca controller is compatible with the motherboard. The Areca stand at CeBIT told me they sended controllers to different manufactors (Asus, MSI, etc.) to test the compatibility and will update the 'Compatibility list' on the website.

UPDATE:

Until now it's not yet possible to combine for example one VGA and one RAID card in an SLI Motherboard, it's a BIOS issue.

So, I hope getting more news soon

This is really a dream for every programmer & gamer... The Grand Canyon Monitors

Sony Ericsson announced today the P910 smartphone, more information about the release can be found here.
A review about the P910 smartphone can be found at My-Symbian.com.