Gigabyte introduced it new line of Z68 motherboards capable of ssd caching with Intels Smart Response technology but their upcoming release in June will be of particular interest. It seems that Gigabyte is pushing to be the first to release a motherboard with mSATA capabilities to take advantage of Intels Larson Creek slc SSDs. We have to wonder whether this …

OCZ Technology announces the Talos series, a line of Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) SSDs designed for enterprise applications that require ultra-fast, high capacity solutions equipped with multi-level cell (MLC) NAND. Talos brings new strength to the Company’s storage lineup by expanding the availability of OCZ’s proprietary Virtualized Controller Architecture (VCA) technology to storage OEMs. . “We have experienced considerable demand …

Emphase, a trusted provider of Industrial and Military solid state storage for embedded systems, has launched a new series of rugged Military-grade storage with MIL-STD-810F compliance. The new Emphase MIL-SPEC S5 Series SSD is engineered to withstand the severe conditions encountered in the line of duty while delivering comprehensive data protection. An SLC flash device available in a 2.5 footprint …

It was some time ago that we were putting our Test Bench together and we were contacted by a company called Icy Dock.  As coincidence had it, Jeff Sung, Sales and Marketing Manager of Icy Dock USA, thought we might be interested in their 4 in 1 SAS/SATA Backplane RAID Cage for our new system. Today, we find ourselves with …

ICY DOCK METAL 2.5″ TO 3.5″ SATA/SSD CONVERTER WITH RAID (MB982SPR-2S) Once again, this cage is a very well built metal cage and will hold two 2.5″ drives for RAID use and fits into a 3.5″ adapter slot.  It would be a great idea for hard drive use but, on the SSD front, there are two limitations of the unit.  …

Perhaps one of 2011’s most memorable technology accolades will be the introduction of SATA 6Gbps to the computing environment and the flurry of activity as companies jump in feet first to stay abreast of the change. In the SSD world, early entries were seen by Crucial and Intel with their Marvell 9174 controllers while the SandForce SF-2200 series was seen …

The heart and sole of all ‘Sandforce Driven’ SSDs is the processor and the SF-2280 and the 6G is well equipped with this as well as 16 modules of Micron 25nm NAND memory (29F128G08CFAAB) for a total of 256GB of RAW memory on board. SandForce equipped SSDs are rather unique, however, because a specific amount of this memory is proprietary …

ATTO DISK BENCHMARK 2.46 ATTO Disk Benchmark is perhaps one of the oldest benchmarks going and is definitely the main staple for manufacturer performance specifications.  For our testing, we use a set length of 256mb and test both the read and write performance of various transfer sizes ranging from 0.5 to 8192kb.  Manufacturers prefer this method of testing as it …

CRYSTAL DISK BENCHMARK VER. 3.0 X64 Crystal Disk Benchmark is used to measure read and write performance through sampling of raw (0/1 Fill) or random data.  As we have discussed previously, comparing the results of Crystal tests in random data sampling between drives that use compression in storage (SandForce) compared to those that do not (Intel/Crucial/Samsung) portrays a result not …

AS SSD BENCHMARK VER 1.64 AS SSD Disk Benchmark is perhaps the only benchmark program that was created for solid state drives.  In using it, one should realize that it only tests in random data so SandForce drives will appear to have an inferior result when compared to those of Samsung Intel and Crucial.  As well, the end result of …