hansolo77

(grumble grumble) We need some more scores posted! We have so many players now, there's gotta be somebody out there who beat wolfman24! BTW, we only have 8 days left. Kinda sad, considering we gave you guys an extension and allowed a whole extra month to get those scores in. So lets see some action!

Another great post! 9th place this time though, but still that's pretty good considering the skills of our members here! Updated OP, DB, RSS

Wow nice job! Put you onto the Top 10 board, and even got you in 8th place! I'm jealous! Updated OP, DB, RSS

Don't wanna read that. Don't make me read that! Any spoilers or "speculation" other than a trailer is beyond what I want to see.

Friend of mine at covecube (DrivePool website) posted this guy: http://www.supermicro.com/products/chassis/4U/946/SC946ED-R2KJBOD.cfm Now that's crazy. My piddly 24 case don't seem so bad now does it?

Want something REALLY crazy? Check this guy out: http://www.45drives.com/products/storage/xl60.php

LOL. To be honest, in my old system, I had 15 drives. 7 internal (SSD not mounted anywhere, and 6 in bays) and 8 External via hotswap bays using converters that transform 3 5.25in bays into 5 3.5in bays, and 2 5.25in bays into 3 3.5in bays. It worked great, but I was having a lot of issues when I wanted to upgrade to more space. I'd have to find the smallest drive, and replace it with a newer/larger capacity one. Then I was having trouble because all the hotswap bays were all Sata 1 only, and not compatible with drives over 2TB. So I was ending up replacing my larger capacity drives in the inside drive bays (connected directly to the motherboard) and that required taking both side panels of the case off, and a lot of hassle getting the plugs setup. This upgrade to a 24-bay system was just the next step. I could have went with the Norco RPC-4220, which gives you 20 hot swap drives, 3 SSD/Laptop Drives, and an Optical drive. But I figured if I'm going to do all that and spend that money, I might as well get the big daddy. As it is right now, before I buy the new motherboard/etc, I have 17 drives installed. This is only because of hardware limitations, where I only have 2 mini-SAS reverse breakout cables (totaling 8 drives) and 2 mini-SAS direct cables (totaling 8 drives) and 1 direct connected SSD. I don't even really have all to much on my drives either. Using Drive Pool, I have it configured with EVERYTHING in the pool being duplicated twice for redundancy (which has come in handy very often with cheap desktop drives). My plan is to eventually upgrade all these drives to either 4TB NAS drives or 8TB Storage drives. The NAS drives are actually a pretty good price right now, but they're not designed for typical gaming PC/etc usage. They spin slow, and have error checking to help eliminate bad sectors. The Storage drives are the latest/greatest, and actually use SMR for read/write which is also slow spinning and typically used in large storage arrays.

My friend at work told me the other day that there is actually a Deadpool comic out there that says in real life, he's Ryan Reynolds. LOL! The cool thing, that was said like 10 years ago, way before Ryan was cast and a movie was in production.

Yeah I saw that. I still wish I had a system capable of playing it (better gaming PC or Xbox One).

I actually don't have a switch yet. I will buy one later after I've upgraded everything else. Probably before I get the Xeon though. I plan on getting the lowest end Celeron that it supports first. Also, I don't plan on doing anything like VMs. I have no use for it. In fact, I've never even attempted setting anything like that up before, so I would be completely lost. Since my requirements are just solid media streaming and maybe transcoding, I think this is the most I would ever need. Thanks tthurman for your input. It's nice to know at least that I'm on the right track.

So for those of you who were somewhat interested and followed my exhaustive thread here: "Finally going to try WHS 2011" and actually read my step-by-step upgrade plan here, I felt like I needed to move the whole topic to a new thread. Reason mostly being because I've ditched using Windows Home Server 2011 as my OS of choice. I'm still dealing with Microsoft though, but it's been easy going for the last month or so. Basically, I was looking around on the internet to try and come up with a solution to a major problem I had with WHS 2011, where my user accounts got corrupted. They were preventing me the administrative access I needed to be able to make essential system changes (like running regedit, adjust networking, etc). It wouldn't even let me create a new user admin user account and delete the old one because the account that creates it needed to be an admin account (which it was). It was such a mess I decided to just chuck the whole thing (the OS that is) and try something new. I found that if I wanted to, Microsoft was offering a free, 180-day (6 months!) trial of Windows Server Essentials 2012 R2, which was the next step in the Home/Small Business server tree after WHS 2011. I really like it so far, and I'm only about 1.5 months into the usage of it. So now I'm using WSE 2012 R2 and simply loving it. There were some initial hiccups with the configuration of DNS/Domain and things, but that's all been worked out for the most part, and now I'm just using it as I originally intended; a media streaming file server with client PC backups. The latest news that I don't think I've posted about yet, is I got that Norco RPC-4224 server chassis! You know, the one with the 24 drives? It got sorta busted in shipping, at the fault of FedEx, but it still works. And it's only a minor blemish on an otherwise amazing case. I'll never even really see it since it's hidden away out of sight anyway. So here's the part where I ask for some help from the tech geeks around here. If you remember, I created a Phase 1..2..etc of the plan to upgrade. I've deviated from that with the help of some new friends over at the StableBit forums. I'm now on the mark for a complete overhaul. I've gutted all the parts out of the old case, and it's now at the dump. My new case (24-drive one) now has all the drives from the old case, plus I added 6 more tonight that I had been saving under the bed for emergencies. My next upgrade (saving for now) is a brand new motherboard / cpu / ram combo. The first thing I have to do is decide on the motherboard and that's where I need your guy's help. This is a basic run down of the minimum requirements I'm going to need: - ATX, mATX, EBB Form Factor - 1 PCIe 8x slot (to install the SAS Controller Card in) - 1 PCIe 8x slot (to install the SAS Expander Card in that I plan to order after everything else is installed) - 1 SATA for SSD OS Drive - 1 IPMI Network Interface Jack - 2+ GB NICs (for better throughput and stability on the network) - Xeon Capable (my ultimate CPU purchase I'll probably ever make) - ECC RAM Capable (required for Xeon) As it is right now, I'm looking at server-grade motherboards, and have narrowed it down to 1 board in particular. ASRock Rack E3C224-4L. This meets all the requirements I need, and is a fairly good price. The only downside is that the board is only capable of Xeon E3 chips, which at the moment only go up to 4 core, 3.6 Ghz Speed, with 8MB L3 Cache. The newer E5 chips, while capable of 12 core, 30MB L3 Cache, are also over $2k!!! I don't need anything like that. But I would like a beefy system. I am willing to look at others, but I think for the most part I'm comfortable with the E3 chip, and plan on that route. Once the motherboard is completely decided on, I will buy whatever cheapest ram and cpu I can get to make it work so I can verify the mobo isn't DOA. Then I'll upgrade to more ram and cpu. So what do you guys say? Got an alternative motherboard in mind that I can use? What would you recommend?

I play Halo 2 sometimes through XLinkKai with my Canadian buddies. You're right though, it seems like it's the only game anybody ever plays on there. I never owned an Xbox though, I got the 360. If I ever get an Xbox, it would be to play the KotOR games, which are unplayable on the 360 after a certain point. It sucks too, that nobody out there in the world was ever able to mod the game to make it not break. I really want to play it. I have a copy for the PC but I can't get comfortable and just "play" it on my PC because I have to sit on the floor to use it. I too would like to know how you got on with the power line adapter. I've been considering getting something like that to help with the throughput of streaming from my home server to the bluray player in the living room. The bandwith should be great, I have a wireless AC1600 router (NETGEAR R6250), which should be blasting awesome speeds through out the house. Unfortunately, the living room seems to only get like 128k speeds when streaming (the player is an 802.11-N capable one). Our wireless devices like my phone and our Kindle Fires all get great speeds. Just can't figure this guy out. Maybe that bluray player is faulty. But if we can get a wired connection it should be great. The distance is over 100ft though, and dad/stepmom don't want to see a Cat5/6 running down from the ceiling and tacked up in the hall. Power line adapters would be great.

I would caution the idea of uninstalling Shark. If it uninstalls the codecs it installed, it could break the LAV codecs. But, if somebody can find an easy way to reinstall them, it's probably a safe bet.

Not a bad idea. Cowboys vs. Aliens is a movie I still haven't watched yet! LOL. But seriously, there are a lot of cool games in that "category" so I think that's a reasonable suggestion. We'll toss it around in the PM's and see what the outcome is.

Moved up a spot on the boards with that score! Good job! Updated OP, DB, RSS

Wow! So close to MO you can almost taste it! You've definitely secured the 8th place spot! Keep it up, you're doing great! Updated OP, DB, RSS

So totally awesome.. VR is coming along great! Also, interesting how the topic went from Space Sims, to VR lol.

Cool I wanna fly in one!

I just double checked TwinGalaxies. They show the rules as having Demo Mode ON. I've corrected the OP. I've not played this game yet, so I'm not sure if ON or OFF is the default, so I just left it RED.

Hahah! Since I updated this board today with your new score garetmax, I thought it interesting to note that the player you knocked off (GimmeClassics) had his highest score entered on this day, exactly 2 years ago! How cool is that? Hard to believe we've been running the HS Comps that long! Updated OP, DB, RSS

It's an improvement for sure! I'm still mad at myself that I haven't played this yet! Updated OP, DB, RSS

Double check your configuration, especially the command line. What emulator are you using? If you're using Fusion, my command line is: Fusion.exe -32x -fullscreen "[ROMPATH]\[ROMFILE]"Hope that helps. If you're using a different emulator, we'll have to investigate further.

Heh, sorry, that was old news. Already almost 2 weeks old. When I heard about this, I was heart broken. I still don't own a next gen console or PC capable of playing this.

Lol isn't that 2nd pic from the reboot of Land of the Lost?

I wasn't sure if Centipede allowed continues or not, that's why I was hesitant. I'll accept the score! Update OP, DB, RSS