In order to test the sheer bandwidth that this unit can pass along using a single raid controller we are going to the Patriot WildFire 120 GB SSDs. The maximum throughput that this RAID controller we have connected to the ARC-4036 is around 2.7 Gb/s. There will be no cache used. IOMETER RESULTS The test is with one worker using …

Click for closer inspection  CONCLUSION Having reached the end of our journey, I will admit that it did run a bit longer than expected.. The Areca enclosure is full of tons of features that one wouldn’t really expect to find with a JBOD/expander in its price range. It certainly has a lot of features to cover. The device is well …

As SSD technology continues to radically change the storage landscape, hybrid devices of many varieties are popping up left and right. Today, we are going to look at a device called the RAIDon HyBrid RunneR which is a blend of both HDD, and SSD. Primarily aimed at the user-on-the-go, the RunneR is a very interesting device that allows for data …

As we can see, installation is just as simple as any CD-ROM device; simply slide it into your drive bay and then tighten it into position. It is then as simple as installing a SATA data cable and then connecting power to the device. The device fits snugly and perfectly into a standard 5.25 inch drive bay. Now, I know …

Once the device is physically installed into the computer, the next task is to setup the program that allows us to control and configure the RunneR, the HyBrid GUI (Graphical User Interface) The user can install an operating oystem directly to the drive at this time if it will be used as a boot drive.  Power up the device and …

Once configured and setup, one thing we did notice was that the device is not NCQ compatible. This results in some abnormally low random access high QD results. In order to provide an accurate representation of the performance of the device we compiled results from two setups with the device itself. The first result will be performance with the HDD …

IOmeter 2008 We ran some IOmeter configurations to test several access patterns on the device. Again, we are looking to compare the differences of the different setups. The Sequential 64mb test is to measure the overall speed with large files, and the 32mb test is to test with medium file sets. As you can see the SSD Alone still shows …

Real World Usage There is a bit of confusing data here. The device benchmarks, so far, show extremely great gains when compared to a HDD used alone. The acceleration over the typical HDD is quite impressive yet it still lacks behind the performance if you were to use the SSD alone. Occasioonally synthetic benchmarks can be a bit misleading. The …

Operating System Load Times Once again we are going to see the performance of real world usage except this time in regards to the amount of time it takes to load the operating system (Win7) using the three different scenarios. The lower time of loading is best. The SSD Alone only slightly outperforms the SSD/HDD combo inside of the HyBrid …

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 …