WIN7 EXPERIENCE INDEX The Win7 Experience Index (WEI) represents Microsofts method of rating computer systems and, more specific to our usage, provides a storage evaluation through a graduated rating system up to 7.9 on pc components and the system as a whole. This benchmark is built into Windows and anyone can use it by simply typing: Go to Win Orb/All …

PCMARK VANTAGE HDD SUITE One thing that becomes readily apparent when we are running the synthetic benches is that they are just that; synthetic. Where the SandForce drives really excel is in the actual real world tasks, that utilize a variety of data. In PCMark Vantage the data simply cannot be manipulated, and a result is provided based on the …

CONCLUSION At the end of the day, we need to illustrate a very important point. While the LSI 9265-8i is the fastest RAID card on the planet, it simply cannot give these drives the true justice that they deserve.  The throughput of the Patriots, both in MB/s and IOPS, if they could scale perfectly in RAID would be phenomenal. 4.440 …

Today we are evaluating the newest version of CacheCade, a storage caching system developed by LSI for use with their MegaRAID controllers. This system aims to create the perfect fusion between HDD capacity and SSD speed, accelerating new or existing storage subsystems that are already in place. A previous CacheCade v1.0 review of the software illustrated some of the extreme …

UNDERSTANDING THE ‘TIERED’ APPROACH The CacheCade Pro system separates the volumes into three distinct layers. Commands are issued from the host system which, in this illustration, is to the left. From there the data will travel to the RAID controller and, in a normal system, right to the HDD array. With the implementation of this system, there is a separate …

One of the major improvements with the CacheCade Pro version is that write data can also be cached. The write caching is a tremendous accelerator for any HDD array, be it large or small. One of the major weaknesses of any storage medium is writing, especially in mixed read/write scenarios. An unfortunate side-effect of writing is that it slows down …

TCO is an acronym which stands for ‘Total Cost of Ownership’. This is one of the most important measurements that must be taken into consideration when deciding whether or not to upgrade. Basically put…What is this going to cost and is it a viable investment? When confronted with the thought of upgrading to SSDs, many will balk at the prohibitive …

This is the Test Bench.  As you may have guessed, it truly is no ordinary Test Bench, and I have dedicated many many hours creating this build which has been used in many benchmarking excursions and extreme overclocking sessions. She has even set a few HWBot world records along the way! Our main focal point in this report will be …

One of the hardest situations to simulate with IOmeter is the acceleration of arrays with rapidly changing data in a caching scenario. Writing test files to a Base Array with a CacheCade Pro Volume enabled resulted in a very quick pace of acceleration. Once the test file is written in its entirety, the ramp is almost instantaneous. What we are …

With each page we are progressing into more difficult scenarios. The ‘overlapped regions’ is one of the most complex access patterns. It is much more demanding of the caching algorithm. What we are simulating is a scenario that would be found typically in a large dataset on a typical server. The areas of the disk that are hot data are …