RAID Cards

Take a look at the three SSDs below.  They are as fine of an example as you can get to demonstrate just how far we have come in flash technology.  On the left is the Intel 910 Data Center SSD.  Paul Alcorn posted his review  of this SSD way back in 2012.  It had top speeds of 2GB/s, IOPS up …

It has been some time now since Intel introduced VROC (Virtual RAID on CPU) and VROC provides for a capability on our motherboards that all would have hoped to see some time ago; the ability to create a bootable RAID configuration.   At the consumer and enthusiast level, VROC is only available in newer X299 chipset motherboards at present, and these …

It was only a few weeks ago that ASRock announced their newest Ultra Quad M.2 Card, yet today we have it in hand and tested.  The ASRock Ultra Quad M.2 Card bears a striking resemblance to the HighPoint SSD7101 RAID Controller we tested a few months back… but there are some very distinct differences that we will point out in …

When it comes to storage management, RAID configurations of some kind have proven to be top dog when it comes to performance.  This was initially shown in our report of the Intel 910 PCIe SSD way back in 2012 and, more recently, with the Kingston DCP1000 NVMe SSD that reached 7GB/s throughput and over 1 million IOPS.  The Kingston DCP1000 …

If you have read our latest review of the Kingston DCP1000 SSD, you will see that multi-M.2 SSD designs can result in some of the highest speeds we have seen in SSD performance.  In the case of the Kingston DCP1000, we pulled off performance of 7GB/s throughput and 1.2 million IOPS from a single AIC (add-in card) HHHL design. This …

When we started receiving 12Gbps SAS products in the summer of 2013, we were met with typical products such as the Adaptec ASR-8885 RAID Adapter, the LSI SAS 9300-8e HBA and the HGST SSD800MM SSD.  Each of these products delivered excellent performance that far outpaced the 6Gbps versions that they were built on.  But, in order to have a full …

When it comes to high performance RAID add-in cards, there are really only two big players in the market: Adaptec and LSI.  These two have been duking it out for years, each one constantly trying to one up the other, with LSI often coming out on top.  To give you a bit of history, lets take a look back at …

When we first caught wind of the Adaptec Series 7 RAID adapters late last year, we were itching for the chance to get it in our test bench. But, in order to do the review justice, we needed SSDs. We needed a LOT of SSDs. We needed 24 SSDs. Unfortunately, sampling even 4 or 8 SSDs at one time is …

Right on the heals of their 7 Series RAIDCards capable of up to 16 and 24 port input, Adaptec plans on releasing the next in the 16 port family this March, the 71605H Host Bus Adapter. Currently available in the eight port design, this new release will bump performance up to 1 million IOPS at 512K random, or 850,000 IOPS …

This year at FMS 2012, we were met one day by LSI representatives who politely handed us a non-nondescript cardboard box and simply said, “Enjoy”. We had been waiting for this box for some time and new it to be the LSI Nytro MegaRAID NMR 8120-4i Application Acceleration Card, part of the trinity of new LSI application accelerating products, all …