Raid/Enterprise

Data security is an issue for all users these days. Losing a single drive worth of pictures, documents and videos can be just as devastating as a house fire, tornado, or even a hurricane for many people. It will remain to be that those things, unable to be replaced, are most missed by any victim of mother nature, or the …

Its been a while in the making but The SSD Review has finally got its hands on eight (8) new generation SATA 3 SSDs in the name of Patriot Wildfire 120GB SATA 3 SSDs for RAID testing. With a host of companies offering the latest SandForce controllers on their SSDs, Patriot is setting out to leap above the pack with …

This is the my Test Bench and it is truly as intimidating as it appears. Many hours of dedicated planning and consideration have gone into this build and it has been used in many benchmarking excursions and extreme overclocking sessions. She has even set a few HWBot world records along the way!  Click on the photo for full resolution. SYSTEM …

ANVIL STORAGE UTILITIES Fast becoming one of our favorites, and a go-to benchmark, is the new Anvil Storage Utilities. This is a Beta version, as it is still under development. This benchmark is just too great to pass up though, and we will be using the 1.0.28 Beta6 version. A key thing here is to note the extremely high IOPS …

HDTUNE PRO 4.61 One thing that became very apparent when using the Patriots was the excellent latency that we were receiving. A PCIe raid card allows the SSD to function at its very best, eliminating much of the overhead and latency of some other connection methods. The LSI 9265-8i is a great performer and allowed for some of the best …

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 …