Storage News - Page 98

CES 2012 - One of the most interesting stories to come from CES 2012 has to do with Mushkin. Mushkin is an old timer, been around this market for a long time. Remember who made the first PC-150 SDRAM? Yeah, now you get it. Well Mushkin has some new backing and they bring the two things needed to return a company to greatness, money and engineers.

So how many engineers you might be wondering, let's just say enough to pull off a PCIe card with built in RAID on 2, 4 or 8 SSDs on board. All of the power requirements are handled by the main PCB and the SSDs are on daughter cards. The controller is different on all three cards but at this time they are Marvell based. Mushkin is looking at some of the new upcoming LSI controllers so nothing is set in stone at this time. Either way they go, look for this to compete on the high end enthusiast market and steer into some entry level enterprise systems.

mSATA is about to take off and Mushkin is getting ready to dive right in as well. Here we see two modules, one with 25nm IMFT asynchronous flash the other with 24nm Toshiba Toggle flash. Mushkin is looking to hit both the entry level and those of us with a need for the highest speeds possible today.

CES 2012 - We managed to sneak into the OCZ suite here in Las Vegas before anyone else and we got a look at their range of new enterprise storage solutions and the one that stood out for me was the demo of two Z-Drive R4 RM1616 PCI-E 2.0 drives running together in RAID 0 to produce some really mind-blowing performance numbers.

The Z-Drive R4 RM1616 is not a desktop part and easily out of reach for pretty much all consumers, if you have the big bucks, this is the ultimate storage though. The drives come with no less than 16 SandForce 2500 series controllers and up to 16TB of storage capacity. In the video of the demo you can see above, OCZ had two RM1616 drives setup in one system running together in RAID 0 mode.

This outrageousness is able to produce almost 13GB/s (yes - we are talking 13,000MB/s) and close enough to 100,000 IOPS with random 128k reads. And with random 4k reads IOPS hit a crazy 1.4 million IOPS and that is being limited by an Intel X79 system. With a faster computer, OCZ reckons the solution can hit up to 2 million IOPS in the 4k read range.

CES 2012 - We had a little treat today while visiting GIGABITE. Colin Brix stopped by with a hand full of new motherboards right from the R&D labs. We can't say too much about them but you can start to see how these will eventually become XXX-UD3, XXX-UD5 and so on.

Being the storage editor here at TweakTown I started looking closer at the storage options on these next generation motherboards. SATA III all over the place, check! Intel motherboards today are limited to just two SATA III ports but that will be a thing of the past really soon. What is even more impressive though is that most of these boards include either an mSATA or mini PCIe slot for HDD cache capabilities. We still need to determine if these boards are using mSATA or mini PCIe but will be digging for the information this evening. With OCZ showing their new Kilimanjaro, a joint OCZ and Marvell controller that uses mini PCIe 3.0 we have to wonder if mSATA is going to be replaced for Intel SRT with mini PCIe 3.0.

I'll update this post when I know more.

CES 2012 - It took me a couple of days to get the spelling right but now I'm ready to talk Kilimanjaro. OCZ was ready to talk Kilimanjaro today as well so.

Usually when we start talking about PCIe to flash controllers (as opposed to SATA to flash) we are talking about Fusion-io. Well there is a new game in town and this game is being played on the PCIe 3.0 field. The Kilimanjaro controllers I've seen so far were branded with both OCZ and Marvell names.

In the shot above we see the enterprise Z-Drive R5 which uses an 8x PCIe 3.0 slot, can push up to 3GB/s and churn around 1.8 million IOPS as long as your processor or processors can handle the load. OCZ it talking about capacities up to 12TB. There should be a few different models based on capacity and flash type, either MLC, eMLC or SLC. No word on pricing but I think Honda Civic range should sound about right.

In today's world of high-speed data transfers, cameras and their memory cards have been relatively left behind. But, Sony have stopped that with the Sony XQD memory card, based on the PCI-Express specification, the XQD format is aimed at improving digital image capture speed and performance.

It is capable of capturing up to 100 frames in RAW format in continuous shooting mode. Sporting write speeds of 125MB/sec, and theoretical maximum write speeds of 5Gb/s, or roughly 600MB/sec. You can see how this is exciting for photographers. Director of consumer media for Sony Electronics, Viviano Cantu, says:

Advanced shooters want to capture the moment in the highest quality possible, and that often means dealing with massive files like RAW images. Memory card technology has done a great job of keeping pace, but these new cards give an entirely new meaning to speed and performance.

CES 2012 - Long before SandForce, Marvell or even Intel were churning out SSD controllers MemoRight was breaking new ground on the SSD frontier.

We've been reviewing their products for several years now and always found MemoRight SSDs to be of the highest quality no matter what controller was used.

A big reason for the high quality coming from MemoRight is their military division, products designed for use in aircraft, marine and in infantry platforms. Here we see a military class SSD with several surface mount capacitors. MemoRight explains this as like having a UPS built into each drive.

Alright, so our first video from Las Vegas this year at CES is from Storage Visions 2012 where we ran into Rob from Micron. He was a little reluctant at first, but we managed to get him on video to give us a little hands-on and some details about their newest product called the Crucial Adrenaline.

This is an SSD drive that will be coming out sometime soon (we are guessing late January to early February timeframe) and it will come with a capacity of 50GB. Why only 50GB? You shouldn't really think of this drive as a traditional SSD, it's a caching drive. It is designed to complement your existing system and introduce some of the performance benefits you can see from flash based storage.

It works in tandem with your current HDD setup and the Adrenaline caches the most common files that you use to provide an easy to install and afford boost to system performance. We've already been told we can expect a review sample in the next two weeks and you can probably expect to see it go on sale just a little after that based on previous products we have got in from Crucial to review.

Earlier this week we attended a Thecus lunch here in Taipei where we were served up an exclusive look at its upcoming N4800 NAS.

You can think of the N4800 as a refresher of the N4200 PRO NAS which did very well for Thecus this year. It has been upgraded with a faster Intel Atom processor that includes with it a faster GPU as well as chipset and USB 3.0.

Vincent from Thecus was kind enough to go on video as you can see above where he also introduced us to the dual bay N2800 NAS. Both new NAS as we've mentioned come with HDMI output which is able to output HD video at 1080p as well as allow you to use the NAS admin interface and other NAS applications directly on your television.

WD have just cut their warranty on Blue and Green drives, and Seagate didn't want to be left behind so they've followed suite. Segate had just sent a letter to authorized distributors where they've said:

Effective December 31, 2011, Seagate will be changing its warranty policy from a 5 year to a 3 year warranty period for Nearline drives, 5 years to 1 year for certain Desktop and Notebook Bare Drives, 5 years to 3 years on Barracuda XT and Momentus XT, and from as much as 5 years to 2 years on Consumer Electronics.

The details on the new warranty periods are as follows:

Western Digital in a strange move, has cut the warranty of Caviar Blue, Caviar Green and Scorpio Blue drives from three to two years. Channel partners received a letter from SelectWD explaining the news, where it is said that Caviar Black and Scorpio Black drives will still receive five-year warranties.

The SelectWD letter says:

This new warranty policy will be effective for drives shipped from January 2nd, 2012. It is important that you take a moment to update your website(s) and collateral to reflect this change for effected drives shipped after January 1st, 2012.