Introduction

There is just something dandy about having a super fast computer that gets our hearts beating faster than usual. And it's always nice to have access to the latest and greatest new parts to come onto the market to enable our fetish. It's not usually a challenge to say we have the fastest PC on the street; the challenge is coming up with new ways to push things and really put things to work. We want to impress you, our readers, with what is possible with new tech and quite a few dollars - and today we think we will do just that.

Today our focus is on SATA 3.0, the latest computer bus interface for mass storage devices like hard drives and of course solid state disk drives. SATA Revision 3.0 or SATA 6 Gbit/s as it is also known replaced SATA 2.0 with several improvements including importantly for us here today a doubling of the maximum throughput from 375MB/s to 750MB/s per connected device.

What do you do with all that extra bandwidth that is offered by the new bus? You put it to work, of course! We hit up the folks over at Areca about a brand spanking new SATA 3.0 SAS controller that they have started selling and they obliged our request and sent on over one of their new ARC-1880i controllers for the job.

Next up, we needed something to connect up to this shiny new RAID controller and we enlisted the help of the folks over at Crucial for this part of the mission. They were friendly enough to ship over no less than four of their RealSSD C300 256GB SATA 3.0 solid state disk drives.

Now with the arsenal in place to wage a pretty mighty storage war against the other side, we were set to begin and see just what SATA 3.0 is capable of when teamed up with some pretty fierce new hardware.