New Link_A_Media Devices controller scores Corsair Neutron 'Best of Computex 2012' Award

Subject: Storage | June 12, 2012 - 08:50 PM | Allyn Malventano
Tagged: ssd, neutron, LAMD, corsair, computex

Last week during Computex, Corsair jointly announced a new SSD to their lineup. Their partnership was with Link_A_Media Devices (LAMD), and the new Corsair Neutron Series scooped up Tom Hardware's "Best of Computex 2012" award:

The LAMD press blast for this event included some additional technical specs:

Key Features

SATA 6G host interface
8 NAND channels, up to 4CE per channel
Support for 2y-nm and 1x-nm NAND Flash from all major Flash vendors
ONFi 2.3, Toggle Mode 1 and Legacy NAND interfaces
Proprietary endurance improving eBoostTM technology
End-to-end user data path protection
Strong BCH ECC capability with area/power efficient decoder architecture
Enterprise-class proven firmware for NAND management and data transport operations
Variable NAND over-provisioning
Efficient garbage collection and global wear leveling
RAID/Chipkill technology
Proven unsolicited power loss management
Low power design
S.M.A.R.T. support
Microsoft® Windows® 7 TRIM support

Performance (using MLC NAND)

Sequential Read: 550 MB/s
Sequential Write: 550 MB/s
Random Read (4KB): 90K IOPS
Random Write (4KB): 90K IOPS

What caught my eye was the "Enterprise-class proven firmware" part. If this is LAMD's first entry to market, how can they possibly have 'proven' anything, especially in the enterprise sector? If it wasn't for the lack of compression, I'd be inclined to think this was some sort of re-brand of SandForce tech. Clearly this is something to remain curious about as more information is disclosed.

Full press blast after the break.

Source: Award Photo @ Business Wire

ioSafe SoloPRO and Synology DiskStation 212+ - Disaster-proof Networked Storage

Author: Allyn Malventano

Date: June 7, 2012

Subject: Storage

Manufacturer: ioSafe SoloPRO Product Page

Tagged: waterproof, video, synology, SoloPRO, iosafe, fireproof, diskstation

ioSafe: Introduction and Internals

Introduction:

Cloud storage is all the talk these days, and our own Tim Verry has been hard at work detailing as much of it as he can keep up with. While all of us at PCPer currently use cloud based solutions for many of the day-to-day goings on, it's not for everyone, and it tends to not be for very large chunks of data, either. Sometimes local storage is just the way to go – especially when you want to be the one in absolute control of the reliability and integrity of your data.

The general rule for proper backups is to have your local copy, a local backup (RAID is *not* a backup), and an additional off-site backup to cover things like theft, fires or floods. So lets say you simply have too much sensitive data for your internet connection to support bulk transferring to an off-side / cloud storage location. Perhaps the cloud storage for that much space is simply cost prohibitive, or your data is sensitive enough that – despite encryption – you don't want it leaving your network and/or premesis? Perhaps you're just stubborn and want only one backup of your data? I think I might have the answer you've been looking for – behold the ioSafe SoloPRO:

What is this thing, you may ask? On the inside it's one of the available 1, 2, 3, or even 4TB 3.5" hard drives. On the outside it's a very durable and solid steel enclosure. The hard drive is wrapped in a thermally conductive yet water resistant 'HydroSafe' foil that enables water resistance rated at a 10 ft depth for 3 days with no data loss. The bonus, however, is not the water resistance - that featuer is present primarily to battle the side effects of something much more drastic - the ioSafe is fire-proof. That feature comes from what sits between the steel casing and the shrink wrapped hard drive - something ioSafe calls a DataCast (pictured below):

Internals:

I'm going to break from my normal warranty voiding and show a photo from this past Storage Visions conference at the Consumer Electonics Show, where an ioSafe was already cracked open for our viewing pleasure:

Read on for the full review!

SanDisk releases new 'Lightning' bootable, lower-cost competitor to the Intel 910 Series PCIe SSD

Subject: Storage | June 5, 2012 - 01:07 AM | Allyn Malventano
Tagged: ssd, sandisk, pcie, enterprise, computex

Just over a month back we took a look at the Intel SSD 910 Series PCIe SSD. While the specs and performance were excellent, there were some factors preventing use in workstation systems - namely the prohibitive cost and lack of a Boot ROM. With that, it seems SanDisk has made an attempt to answer that call. Today at Computex they announced a new PCIe Enterprise SSD, the PCIe Lightning:

This is a much simpler layout, with flash right alongside the controller - an option not possible with the multi-PCB Intel 910 Series as it contained much more flash on its daughter boards. With this simpler layout comes lower cost but unfortunately lower maximum capacities. Less complexity also means lower maximum specs, but they still look quite good given the price point this card will be filling:

Price: $1350 (200GB) / $2350 (400GB)
4k 70/30 R/W split: 23,000 IOPS
Sequential Throughput: 425 MB/sec
Warranty: 5 Year
Endurance: 10 full-drive writes per day for warranty duration

I'm glad to see some good PCIe SSD competition cropping up - especially the bootable kind.

Full release after the break:

Source: SanDisk Lightning Product Page

Corsair Announces 'Neutron' SSD Series Driven by LAMD Controller

Subject: Storage | June 4, 2012 - 06:31 PM | Allyn Malventano
Tagged: neutron, ssd, LAMD, corsair, computex

Today at Computex, Corsair announced a new line of SSDs. This 4th generation line will sport a new controller made by Link_A_Media Devices (LAMD). Their announcement boasts a System On a Chip (SoC) design, but that's the way most modern SSD controllers are architected. The new controller has the following claimed specs:

Neutron (Standard):

90,000 read / 85,000 write IOPS (assumed 4k random)
555MB/s read / 370MB/s write (sequential)

Neutron GTX:

90,000 read/write IOPS (assumed 4k random)
555MB/s read / 500MB/s write (sequential)

Here's a few quick pics:

The drives meet all of the typical SSD wickets, such as TRIM support and a generous 5-year warranty. The specs do look very good, but the proof is in the benches, which we hope to see shortly.

Full press blast follows after the break:

Source: Corsair Neutron Product Page

LSI Demo Shows SandForce SF-2000 Series Driving Toshiba 19nm and IMFT 20nm Flash

Subject: Storage | June 4, 2012 - 06:00 PM | Allyn Malventano
Tagged: computex, SF-2000, sandforce, LSI, flash

As some of you may already be aware, SandForce was acquired by LSI back in January of this year. SandForce has made a very popular SSD controller for some time now and was the first maker to demo a controller driving 25nm flash (last year). Now SandForce (under LSI) has done it once again. This time with the same type of controller driving both 19nm Toshiba and 20nm Micron (IMFT) flash memory types:

The release from LSI reports the controller supporting all six flash vendors, giving some serious flexibiltiy to makers of flash memory systems and products. Aside from a confirmation of the ability to drive newer flash memory types, the remainder of the specs appear largely the same, minus some additional tweaks to ECC necessary to support increased error rates encountered as dies shrink.

Full press release from LSI after the break:

Source: LSI / SandForce information page

2TB of storage in your pocket

Subject: Storage | June 4, 2012 - 03:02 PM | Jeremy Hellstrom
Tagged: western digital, my passport, usb 3.0

Western Digital's line of My Passport portable hard drives have been with us for a while, improving along with the available technology for inexpensive mobile storage. Unfortunately the term inexpensive is used loosely as the industry is still recovering from the disastrous flooding in Thailand, so the 2TB model is just over $200 on NewEgg. However, at that price you get a large amount of storage in a 21 x 82 x 111mm (0.82" x 20" x 4.4") device and since it uses USB 3.0 you won't have to wait all day for transfers. TechARP's testing had it beating almost every device for transfer speed, with only OCZ's 64GB Enyo offering competition on a handful of tests.

"Western Digital has a wide variety of external storage products for both the PC and Mac markets. The external drives are available in both large desktop and smaller portable formats. Under the portable segment alone, Western Digital offers five drive families for the PC, and three drive families for the Mac.

Today, we are going to take a look at their latest portable hard disk drive for the PC market - the 2 TB Western Digital My Passport (USB 3.0)."

Here are some more Storage reviews from around the web:

Storage

Source: TechARP

DV Nation RAMRod PC Review - A Storage Powerhouse

Author: Ryan Shrout

Date: June 1, 2012

Subject: Systems, Storage

Manufacturer: DV Nation

Tagged: x79, sandy bridge-e, RevoDrive 3 X2, ramrod, dv nation

Inside and Out

When you are a little fish in the great big pond of PC builders, you need to do something to stand out from the rest. The people behind DV Nation apparently were well aware of that when entering the system vendor business and offering up SSDs to every single system configuration. Through a new system they are offering, provocatively named the "RAMRod PC", DV Nation provides a pre-built system that has some very unique components and configuration settings.

Built around the Antec Three Hundred Two chassis, the first glance at the RAMRod doesn't really indicate anything special is going on under the hood. But let's take a quick look at the specs:

Intel Core i7-3820 @ 4.4 GHz
64GB DDR3-1600 Memory from G.Skill
Radeon HD 6990 4GB
2x Seagate Momentus XT 750GB Hybrid HDD in RAID-0
OCZ RevoDrive 3 X2 480GB PCIE SSD
RAMCache: SuperSpeed Supercache 8GB on PCIE SSD, 8GB on Momentus
RAMDisk: 42GB ROMEX Primo rated at 8000 MB/s
Cost: $5,400

Obviously there is a LOT of storage work going on in the RAMRod and the purpose of the rig is to be the fastest pre-configured storage available anywhere. If you are looking for a cheaper version of this system you can get a base model with 16GB of memory, 10GB RAMDisk, 2GB RAMCache, 240GB PCIe SSD, single standard hard drive and even at GTX 680 for $2999.

Let's take a quick walk around the rest of the system before diving into the benchmarks!

Continue reading our review of the DV Nation RAMRod PC!!

OCZ launches Agility 4 SSD based on Indilinx Everest 2

Subject: General Tech, Storage | May 29, 2012 - 08:45 PM | Scott Michaud
Tagged: ssd, ocz, Agility 4

OCZ Technology Group launched their latest entry in the Agility 4 line of Solid State Drives. The drive will make use of the Indilinx Everest 2 controller over a SATA 6Gbps interface. It is rated to provide 400MB/s reads with up to 85,000 write IOs per second. Unlike its 5-year Vertex 4 brethren the Agility 4 will be backed by a 3-year warranty.

Just a couple of months ago Al posted his review of the OCZ Vertex 4 solid state drive which he found to be aggressively priced and with good potential depending on firmware support.

OCZ has just released the Agility 4 to complement their new product line with a slightly cheaper and slightly lower performance option compared to the Vertex. Both drives are based on the same Indilinx Everest 2 controller with transfer rates being the main divisor between the two products. Retail price of the Agility 4 is placed much more aggressively and flirts even closer with the $1 per gigabyte line than the Vertex 4.

Almost time to get change our metric to cents per gigabyte. ... Yay!

The Agility 4 is rated to perform with consistent read bandwidths of 400MB/s which is below the Vertex 4’s rated 535 MB/s sequential reads throughput. The write IOPS is rated at 85,000 random transactions per second and exactly matches that metric with the Vertex 4.

OCZ is covering the Agility 4 with a 3-year manufacturer warranty. It is on back-order from NCIX with an expected retail value of $259.20 for the 256GB version which might as well be called a dollar per gigabyte. Newegg has yet to list the product or its expected value.

Source: OCZ

Comay's Venus line of SSDs is designed for paranoid techs

Subject: Storage | May 24, 2012 - 01:14 PM | Jeremy Hellstrom
Tagged: ssd, comay, ups, sandforce, SandForce SF-2281

The Comay Venus Pro 3 comes in seven sizes, ranging from 30GB to 480GB and is powered by a SandForce 2281 controller. Those specs are not very unique, what makes the Comay special is the super-capacitor on the PCB which ensures that no data will be lost in the event of a power outage. It is not quite a UPS in the normal sense but it will provide power for long enough to ensure all data is written from the cache to disk before it powers down. As well there is onboard overload protection to ensure that power spikes cannot damage your drives. Both of these features are sought after by Enterprise clients, almost more so than the performance, which you can read about at SSD Reviews.

"Just over a month ago, we conducted an analysis of what we thought to be the Comay Venus Pro 3 and, only after the review, were informed that we were actually looking at the Venus 3, an SSD that was not only branded incorrectly, but was also a special configuration for a specific customer. It appears our orders were mixed up. Comay apologized for the mix up and promised that we would be receiving a Venus Pro 3 soon enough where we could validate some vicious ‘SandForce Driven’ performance first hand."

Here are some more Storage reviews from around the web:

Storage

Source: SSD Review

Thunderbolt for Windows Performance Preview - ASUS P8Z77-V Premium

Subject: General Tech, Motherboards, Storage | May 21, 2012 - 06:57 PM | Ryan Shrout
Tagged: Z77, thunderbolt, p8z77-v premium, msi, asus

We have really been waiting for this since we first saw the release of Thunderbolt on the Apple MacBooks last year, but we finally have it: Thunderbolt support for PC users! Both MSI and ASUS today announced availability of motherboards with integrated Thunderbolt connectivity: the ASUS P8Z77-V Premium and the MSI Z77A-GD80 will both get you a single integrated Thunderbolt port.

You can see MSI's full press release right here. ~~We can't find the ASUS press release anywhere~~ Here is the ASUS press release as well, but here are a few selections:

"Intel and ASUS have worked closely on the implementation of Thunderbolt technology onto Asus motherboards”, said Jason Ziller, Intel’s Director of Thunderbolt Marketing. “The P8Z77-V PREMIUM is the first Thunderbolt certified motherboard in the industry, a testament to its solid design and compatibility."

...

With its long history of working with high tech vendors, ASUS is able to show its strength and commitment to innovation with a close relationship to three of the leading brands currently producing products with Thunderbolt technology, Elgato, LaCie, and PROMISE.

...

Thunderbolt is a new, high-speed I/O technology designed for performance, simplicity and flexibility, with lightning fast transfer speeds that are twice that of USB 3.0 and up to 20 times faster than USB 2.0. It offers simultaneous bi-directional 10Gbps transfer speeds over a single cable, with the flexibility to daisy-chain up to six Thunderbolt-ready devices with a single connection as well as offering full display port support for a 7th Thunderbolt or display port equipped monitor. This allows for a clutter-free computing experience while offering unprecedented levels of performance. Users can connect multiple Thunderbolt-enabled external storage drives to a Thunderbolt-enabled display and transfer files while watching HD movies, all without experiencing any lag. In addition for content professional this connection has been designed form the ground up for multimedia offering low latency with highly accurate time synchronization for professional audio and video applications. PC enthusiast and gamers can take immediate advantage combining Thunderbolt and on-board Lucid Virtu MVP to enjoy top-notch graphics performance.

Even better, we have some in-action video of the new ASUS Thunderbolt-implementation including performance!

This video was recorded well before today's launch during our Z77 Live Review and clearly shows some of the benefits of Thunderbolt, as well as some of the limitations, you'll find if you pick up the ASUS P8ZZ77-V Premium motherboard!

Source: PC Perspective

Subject: Storage | June 12, 2012 - 08:50 PM | Allyn Malventano Tagged: ssd, neutron, LAMD, corsair, computex

ioSafe: Introduction and Internals

Subject: Storage | June 5, 2012 - 01:07 AM | Allyn Malventano Tagged: ssd, sandisk, pcie, enterprise, computex

Subject: Storage | June 4, 2012 - 06:31 PM | Allyn Malventano Tagged: neutron, ssd, LAMD, corsair, computex

Subject: Storage | June 4, 2012 - 06:00 PM | Allyn Malventano Tagged: computex, SF-2000, sandforce, LSI, flash

Subject: Storage | June 4, 2012 - 03:02 PM | Jeremy Hellstrom Tagged: western digital, my passport, usb 3.0