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FINAL WORDS AND CONCLUSION When I first started building computers two years ago, I asked my friends and colleagues their opinions on who was the best memory manufacturer. The overwhelming response I got<,and still get to this day, is G.SKILL, so I decided to take the dive. I never looked back. As an enthusiast who has G.SKILL sticks in every desktop set-up, …

First, to understand the use of the expander you have to understand the concepts of how the device is connected to the system. Usually one would use a RAID controller, or HBA (Host Bus Adapter) to connect to a large array of either SSD or HDD. This is usually accomplished by a few standard methods. In server environments controllers are …

We received the unit in a plain box, and on opening it, we found this very sturdy box packed inside which, of course, contained the unit.On opening the box, we were greeted with bubble wrap and air packs to cover the top items as you see here; the power cord, manual, screws and connectors.The unit itself was packed perfectly, well …

We have received the unit and inspected the outer characteristics and now feel it’s time to take off the cover and see what’s under the hood. This side of the enclosure is pretty straightforward and we are only including the view to show the slots on the drawers that the trays slide into. On the right the long horizontal slots …

The enclosure is connected via SAS-to-SAS cables to the RAID Controller/HBA. The user can use one or two cables to connect to the computer. Two cables will allow a higher throughput, thus allowing the user to enjoy the “performance” mode of the product. For a user with an 8 disk HDD array, or small arrays of slower devices, one cable …

Now, we have the ARC-4036 enclosure connected to the computer via the host adapter and it is time to connect our drives and get down to work! The drives are easy to install but first we must remove one of the trays in its entirety in order to install the devices. Inspecting the trays themselves is going to highlight again …

Lets now briefly cover the monitoring of the unit. We can use the GUI of an attached RAID/HBA controller to view the properties of the controller from your operating system. Here we are using the Areca ARCHTTP graphical user interface. This program is used to control the RAID controller and its various settings. One area that Areca is known for …

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! …

In order to test the sheer IOPS that this unit can pass along using a single raid controller we are going to the SanDisk ESS Lightning LS 300S drives. The maximum IOPS possible through the RAID controller that we have connected to the ARC-4036 is around 460,000 IOPS. There will be no cache used. Cache of a controller can typically …

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 …

When Dirt 3 was released the developers pointed out that their advanced code took advantage of extra physical processing cores.  Putting this to the test, we decided to investigate this further, by comparing an AMD quad-core and hex-core processor. Full story at KitGuru  

The Llano APU (the desktop variety on test here is codenamed ‘Lynx’) contains the CPU, GPU and northbridge. As a consequence production costs and physical power costs are reduced greatly meaning cost to the consumer is lowered and a competitive performance level is maintained while providing a convenient and streamlined solution. Full story at Vortez.

Have you ever been on a long car ride in the middle of a blazing hot summer afternoon without air conditioning? Well, for those who have always had air conditioned cars, you should try it for a day. Make sure to try it with the windows rolled up, and you will get a feeling of what being stuck in a …

Even though the days of the beige box are over, there still arent a huge number of cases on the market that have a visual wow-factor. A number manufacturers like Lian Li and Fractal Design produce very elegant looking cases which are easy on the eye but arent exactly exciting. Other manufacturers like Cooler Master and Antec take a different …