The SSD Review The Worlds Dedicated SSD Education and Review Resource |

The SSD Review uses benchmark software called PCMark Vantage x64 HDD Suite to create testing scenarios that might be used in the typical user experience. There are eight tests in all and the tests performed record the speed of data movement in MB/s to which they are then given a numerical score after all of the tests are complete. The …

Most recently, an SSD manufacturer finally did what we have been waiting for from SSD companies for quite some time.  We find it amusing that manufacturers haven’t thrown their support in SSD reliability through extended warranties long before this since SSDs have been shown to be pretty much indestructible. Other World Computing (OWC) has not only tackled this with a …

Today we are going to take an in-depth look at CacheCade, a new approach to storage systems that allows the perfect fusion of HDD capacity and SSD speed. With many large databases and enterprise users ‘caught in the middle’ with large HDD arrays, yet needing more performance from their existing infrastructure, CacheCade is a great option that allows the best …

SAN JOSE, CA. June 7, 2011: Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., a world leader in digital consumer electronics and information technology, today announced its 500 gigabyte per platter, one terabyte internal hard disk drive, Spinpoint M8 for use in mobile computing applications such as notebooks. Samsung’s Spinpoint M8, which consists of two 500 gigabyte platters, provides users with one terabyte storage space. …

Network storage is a concept that many people use without a second thought in corporate environments, but what about at home? In addition, a larger number of people are beginning to utilize cloud services, and most of those services include some storage capability. What if you could implement both, easily and with one device? All that and much more is …

Back when I was in high school, I got this particular memorable encouragement note in a fellowship group activity from this girl in church. “Being outspoken all the time does not necessarily make you cool”, it read. “Sometimes there is a need to shut up.” Well, for one thing, this ‘encouragement’ note did not sound very… encouraging. And secondly, in …

Over the coming months as we build up towards finally getting our hands on the Bulldozer platform, we’ll no doubt be looking at plenty of 990FX based motherboards from companies. Having already looked at what ASUS offered us in their ROG Crosshair V Formula board, today we’ll take the time to check out the GIGABYTE option. While GIGABYTE do have …

If it seems like Gigabyte is on top of the world these days, there just may be a reason why. Given exception to their industry leading motherboard selection which seems to be taking awards from all directions, their main Headquarters in Taipei, Taiwan is simply breathtaking. This Gigabyte HQ invite was definitely one of our highlights of Computex 2011. Gigabyte …

The one thing that Computex is not short of is attractive women to draw buyers in to look at the …  products? These beautiful women could be found in just about every booth and all reveled at the opportunity to have their picture taken with company products or Computex visitors. This is our choice as to the best of Computex …

One can improve the performance of small files by up to 50X which for certain types of setups can reap HUGE results. Webservers, File Servers, and OLTP (Online Transaction Processing) will benefit tremendously. There is definitely a large group of users that would be very interested in combining the positive aspects of both solutions (HDD/SSD) into one cohesive unit.  How …

After a period of time the SSD cache is going to be accessed quite frequently, and this has other advantages. Right now Cachecade is a read-only layer, so it might not be easy to understand the tremendous benefits that it has in regards to write performance on the HDD array. By freeing up the HDD from the most constantly addressed …

CacheCade performance is much more dependent on SSD read performance than on SSD write performance, so the performance depends upon the size of the SSDs and the total size of the data hot spots. If there simply aren’t many hot spots on the array being accelerated, you will not gain as large of a performance gain. Once again, in our …

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! …

This is the single source test. The straight read testing just uses a single test file of 50GB that is read from the array as a 4k (aligned) Random Read pattern, at a Queue Depth of 32.  With this test it is showing the absolute best case scenario, results are usually going to be 2x of the more demanding zoned …

Zoned Setup- A more complex read pattern that is much more demanding of the caching algorithm. The overlapped cold-cool-warm-hot data regions IOMeter benchmark is the most stressful on the hot data caching algorithms and so results typically reach performance in the 30,000 to 45,000 IOPS range. The base array in this scenario is generating around 500 IOPS before acceleration, which …