Rich’s Random Podcast Generator: Hybrid Drives, Drive Caching, Icy Dock Xpander, RocketHybrid 1220, Acronis True Image Home 2012 – RRPG011

Today I’m joined by John Zajdler MS WHS MVP and Mike Faucher of BYOB. Jim Collison is off today. So…John’s HP MediaSmart Server EX 490 has died (motherboard) so he’s modding it with plans to turn it into a port multiplier drive bay. Mike had an issue caused by a miniport adapter in bridge mode that was absolutely killing his wired network speed. The miniport adapter was likely installed when he put VirtualBox on his PC. He disabled it in Device Manager and the issue went away. I had the same issue on my laptop where it would occasionally fail to connect to WiFi. I also had been using VirtualBox.

They guys talk about different types of hybrid drive options. A hybrid drive is one that pairs an SSD with a regular spinning hard drive in order to gain speed improvement over using a hard drive only. The trade-off is that you lose the full speed of an SSD but end up with a drive that is still faster than normal and which has a lot of capacity.

Icy Dock Xpander – pairing SSD and hard drive, the device automatically creates a RAID 0 partition equal to 2x the size of the SSD and a 2nd partition equal to whatever space is left over on just the hard drive
HighPoint RocketHybrid 1220 – pairing SSD and hard drive, the card uses SSD caching with claims of up to 80% of SSD performance in

Mike explains a couple of things for us including how to set up SSD caching on a Z68 motherboard using Intel Rapid Storage Drivers. Mike also critiques my WHS 2011’s RAID5 configuration, making some interesting points that has me thinking about going back and setting up the whole array again. The guys also set me straight on WHS 2011’s 2TB server backup limitation which is due to the limitation of the VHD file format in which the backups are stored.

Acronis True Image Home 2012 has a new sync feature that let’s friends and family sync files between each other over the Web.  All three of us have been using Acronis for awhile, and it’s an excellent compliment or alternative to the WHS PC backup function. If you repair PCs, this is a must have tool because of its ability to clone larger drives to smaller ones.

In the show this week: Rich O’Neil, John Zajdler, and Mike Faucher

Rich’s RPG is a weekly show hosted by Jim Collison and Rich O’Neil in Google+ Hangout. We talk tech with like-minded folks, covering whatever’s interesting – hot or not, current or historical. No outlines, no agenda, no worries. We welcome newcomers. Got a headset and a bit of free time? Join us on the show by contacting us at: podcast@theaverageguy.tv or rich@theaverageguy.tv

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