The Hardware

We'll only get into the detail of the two main pieces of hardware we're using today - the rest of our machine will be covered in the testbed in the following pages. Today, though, we've got two main pieces to the puzzle with the first being the 256GB Crucial m4 drives.

We've got a total of four here and we've looked at both the 128GB and 512GB version of the drives and found ourselves already very impressed with what's on offer.

Looking over the drive, there's nothing too out of the ordinary when it comes to the information on hand; we've got the main Crucial sticker on one side, while turning over we've got our information sticker that tells us the firmware, part number, model etc. We can also see they're 256GB SATA 6GB/s drives, or SATA III as we know them as these days.

Towards the back, we've of course got our standard power and SATA connector present; no real surprises at all. Moving away from that, we can take a closer look at our Areca RAID card that's present today. It's actually the same card we used in our Areca ARC-1882i and Corsair Force GT 7 Drive SATA III RAID 0 Setup we checked out a few months ago.

The Areca 1882i is a second generation SATA III RAID card and offers us support for up to eight drives via the two SAS 2.0 ports on the back of the card with the help of two SAS to four SATA port cables that need to be purchased.

Along with SAS 2.0 support, we've got a dual core RAID-on-Chip 800MHz I/O processor and 1GB On-Board Cache via DDR3 1333MHz DDR memory. We've been using Areca RAID cards for these articles for a while now and the ARC-1882i did a fantastic job with our Corsair Force GT 7 Drive setup. We should continue to see strong performance out of it today with our Crucial drives of old and new.