Efficient DC 12V to 5V conversion for low-power electronics, evaluation of six modules 33

Efficient DC 12V to 5V conversion for low-power electronics, evaluation of six modules
I am currently working on a vehicle-installed Arduino project. The device is designed to be powered constantly and I decided to use the car battery as the constant power source. I am designing the device for low power consumption, consuming 50mA or less, ’cause who wants to get stuck with a flat battery, right? Car ...

Experiments with dead space reclamation and the wonders of storage over-provisioning 3

Experiments with dead space reclamation and the wonders of storage over-provisioning
I am in the process of setting up a home storage server that will rely heavily on over-provisioning. You can read more about my previous VMware – FreeNAS – ZFS experiences in other articles. In this article I will conduct several experiments showing how available disk space fluctuates at various layers in the system. This ...

DiskSpdAuto: Automating IO performance tests and result collection using DiskSpd and PowerShell 3

DiskSpdAuto: Automating IO performance tests and result collection using DiskSpd and PowerShell
If you have followed my previous article titled IO Performance Benchmarking 101, you know that I am a big fan of using CrystalDiskMark for measuring disk IO throughput. CrystalDiskMark is a wonderful tool, but being a GUI application it is unsuitable for using in an automated environment or when you need to test several disks ...

IO performance benchmark of unsupported ESXi configurations 2

IO performance benchmark of unsupported ESXi configurations
Introduction VMware is a serious platform for enterprise-scale virtualization. VMware also offers a free ESXi hypervisor and plenty of individuals choose to use that for various small setups, such as home labs or home infrastructure. VMware maintains a list of hardware devices, which are compatible with the hypervisor. VMware products also implement many features and ...

“Closing credits” – Measuring third-party effect on your page load time

A few months ago I was at the ClickTale Forum, an amazing ClickTale customer event in NYC. At the event I got a chance to have many interesting discussions; a theme that repeated in some of them was customers’ concern of adding third-party services to their sites. Who can blame those customers? It is widely ...