I have relocated my server, it is now situated at my parents' house on a 30/30 Mbit fiber connection with much improved bandwidth and better stability. 

My own connections is a assymetrical DSL conection with 20 Mbit down and 2 Mbit up, so 30 Mbit should improve the speed of the site by ALOT!

Misc fiber, new location, server, 30/30, Mbit

I recently bought a hybrid 7200rpms, 500GB(4GB SSD) Seagate Momentus XT hard drive to replace my old 7200rpms, 250GB Seagate Momentus. The XT version comes with a integrated 4GB SSD drive, which is used as a “buffer” between the mechanical storage and the SATA interface, meaning that commonly used files are placed on the faster SSD instead of the slower mechanical disk.

Before I replaced the old Momentus disk in my laptop, I used Visual Studio 2008’s compiler to tests the old disk’s performance when compiling one of SKOVs C# solutions. I did the same benchmark afterwards, on my new XT disk, and I did a “rebuild race” against my SKOV developer laptop. The results are as follow:

My Laptop(old disk) vs My Laptop(new disk):

1. 1:05 vs 0:44 speedup: 1.47
2. 1:02 vs 0:38 speedup: 1.71

SKOV Laptop vs My Laptop(new disk)

1. 1:03 vs 0:35 speedup: 1.80
2. 0:53 vs 0:38 speedup: 1.39
3. 0:55 vs 0:32 speedup: 1.71

Note: I did a clean before each rebuild.

The Seagate Momentus XT delivers a speedup of 39-80% which I think is pretty impressive. Thus, in the worst and best case, the XT decreased the build time by 28% and 44% respectively, which will surely help with my productivity.

If anyone have benchmarking figures when compiling using Visual Studio combined with a high performance SSD, let me know as I am interested in the potential gain of using SSDs.

Misc Seagate, Benchmark, Visual Studio, XT, Momentus, SSD, Solid State Disk, Performance, compile time

I was looking for a simple way to count the number of file downloads on my blog, and stumbled upon SimpleDownloadCounter written by Al Nyveld (http://www.nyveldt.com/blog). The extension simply counts the number of downloads per uploaded file. The download count is only shown when logged in.

The extension did not initially work for BlogEngine 1.6.1.0, but with a little tinkering I got it to work just fine. 

I have uploaded the fixed version here (revision 1.1), enjoy!

SimpleDownloadCounter.cs (5.15 kb)

Misc SimpleDownloadCounter, download, counter, Al Nyveld

My theme, dubbed “HRUP”, is now available for download.

The zip file contains the CSS file, the Master Page, etc. but I have also included a Photoshop file of my banner and the font used. You may edit the banner.psd file and produce a similar looking banner.

The theme comes with no license what so ever, so anyone is free to edit and redistribute as they see fit!

The theme can be downloaded from here: HRUP_Theme_1.0.zip (180.68 kb)

Enjoy!

Misc theme, HRUP, 1.0

Windows 7 allows one to convert multiple basic disks into dynamic disks, either as a mirroring configuration or a striping configuration.

As I just received a subset of the ordered parts for my new server, specifically, the two Samsung 250 GB harddrives and the Antec Mini Skeleton ITX case, I tried to use the two hard drives in a software raid-1 "mirror" configuration, to avoid the "total" data loss that I experienced last week. 

Simply put, I installed Windows 7 on one of the disks and converted the two disks into dynamic disk using the mirror setting. However, it appears that Windows 7 cannot boot from a dynamic disk!?!?!?! this results in the booting process hangs with a "blinking" cursor on a black screen.

I have yet to find a solution to this problem, so be sure to backup your data before messing with dynamic disks as the process of converting a dynamic disk back to a basic disk results in total data loss(for me atleast).  

Misc server, dynamic disks, harddrive, Windows 7