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 …

HDTUNE PRO VER. 4.6 – BENCHMARK HDTune Pro is a great software program that lets us have a look at all aspects of testing through several separate tests: Something particularly interesting about this test is the smoothness of the line which is a great indicator that this is a solid drive.  As well, the access time of .055ms is typical …

PCMARK VANTAGE x64 HDD SUITE 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 …

An Intel ‘Sandforce Driven’ SSD you say? Its almost like a play from a playbook but, once again, someone seems to have gotten their hands on an Intel Roadmap which discusses upcoming SSD releases. All in all we may be seeing up to 5 releases by years end but there is one particularly interesting release in the bunch as shown …