All of our extensive testing with Iometer is, at the end of the day, merely synthetic testing. A program such as this is no easy task to benchmark, especially when using synthetic measurements. The main thrust of the testing is to reproduce situations that are similar to real world applications and how they would behave. I feel that, if anything, …

The storage industry is shifting from 3Gb/s devices to the new 6Gb/s specification which has been a boon to manufacturers as new devices are needed to handle the new, faster devices that 6Gb/s enables. The 3Gb/s specification reigned  for roughly five years which allowed user speeds up to 300 MB/s. With the advent of “disruptive” technologies like SSD devices, the …

First, to understand the use of the expander you have to understand the concepts of how the device is connected to the system. Usually one would use a RAID controller, or HBA (Host Bus Adapter) to connect to a large array of either SSD or HDD. This is usually accomplished by a few standard methods. In server environments controllers are …

We received the unit in a plain box, and on opening it, we found this very sturdy box packed inside which, of course, contained the unit.On opening the box, we were greeted with bubble wrap and air packs to cover the top items as you see here; the power cord, manual, screws and connectors.The unit itself was packed perfectly, well …

We have received the unit and inspected the outer characteristics and now feel it’s time to take off the cover and see what’s under the hood. This side of the enclosure is pretty straightforward and we are only including the view to show the slots on the drawers that the trays slide into. On the right the long horizontal slots …

The enclosure is connected via SAS-to-SAS cables to the RAID Controller/HBA. The user can use one or two cables to connect to the computer. Two cables will allow a higher throughput, thus allowing the user to enjoy the “performance” mode of the product. For a user with an 8 disk HDD array, or small arrays of slower devices, one cable …

Now, we have the ARC-4036 enclosure connected to the computer via the host adapter and it is time to connect our drives and get down to work! The drives are easy to install but first we must remove one of the trays in its entirety in order to install the devices. Inspecting the trays themselves is going to highlight again …

Lets now briefly cover the monitoring of the unit. We can use the GUI of an attached RAID/HBA controller to view the properties of the controller from your operating system. Here we are using the Areca ARCHTTP graphical user interface. This program is used to control the RAID controller and its various settings. One area that Areca is known for …

This is the Test Bench and a quick click will display it close up.  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! …

In order to test the sheer IOPS that this unit can pass along using a single raid controller we are going to the SanDisk ESS Lightning LS 300S drives. The maximum IOPS possible through the RAID controller that we have connected to the ARC-4036 is around 460,000 IOPS. There will be no cache used. Cache of a controller can typically …