StorageReview.com offers in-depth news coverage and detailed reviews for hard drives, SSDs, NAS units, other storage hardware, and software for consumer and enterprise markets. Storage support forums provide a user community ready to offer storage-related discussions, buying advice and technical support.
FEATURED by Kevin OBrien
Samsung SSD SM825 Enterprise SSD Review
The Samsung SSD SM825 is an enterprise-grade SSD that's designed specifically for write-intensive data center workloads. Like all Samsung SSDs, the SM825 leverages all of Samsung's in-house expertise including their own eMLC NAND, 3-core controller and specialized firmware that helps to deliver 7,000 TBW, 100 times what's often seen in standard MLC NAND, while being more cost effective and delivering near-parity performance with SLC NAND. The net result is 4K random write steady state speeds we measured in excess of 9,800 IOPS and sequential 2MB write speeds topping 200MB/s.
January 27th, 2012 by Lyle Smith
OWC Mercury Aura Pro Express 6G SSD Now Available With Toggle NAND
OWC announced at Macworld that its OWC Mercury Aura Pro Express 6G SSD is now available with Toggle NAND for the latest MacBook Air 11.1" and 13.3" models. This change is similar to the upgrade that OWC made switching to Toggle NAND on the Mercury Extreme Pro 6G SSD. The new Mercury Aura Pro Express 480GB model uses SandForce technologies and Tier 1/Grade A Toggle Synchronous NAND delivering data rates of up to 3x faster than factory 3Gb/s options in addition to 8x the storage capacity of the factory’s base 64GB SSD model.
January 26th, 2012 by Kevin OBrien
Dataram XcelaSAN Deployed By ISCorp
ISCorp announced they have deployed the Dataram XcelaSAN storage optimization appliance to improve networked SAN performance during peak times where current equipment couldn't keep up. Paired with Dataram's Acceleration on Demand subcription program, where companies get the benefits of the XcelaSAN without any capital expenditure but instead a monthly fee, the XcelaSAN solution was able to improve existing SAN performance on the fly without diverting staff time to address I/O bottlenecks as they came up. This solution allowed ISCorp to fix problems in hours, rather than days or weeks.
January 26th, 2012 by Brian Beeler
Western Digital My Book Thunderbolt Duo External Hard Drives Push 1000MB/s
Western Digital is showing off their new line of external hard drives with Intel's Thunderbolt interface. When four 6TB enclosures are daisy-chained together, WD showed throughput of 1,000 MB/s. The My Book Thunderbolt Duo has not formally been announced by WD yet, but the drives were shown off at CES and Macworld. Up to six enclosures can be chained together at a time.
January 26th, 2012 by Brian Beeler
LSI 4Q 2011 - WarpDrive Selected by EMC, WarpDrive 2 Nears Production
LSI reported their fourth quarter of 2011 which ended in December with revenues of $523 million. The quarter's highlights included: launch of the first 28nm read channel for hard drives, awarded 6Gb SAS controller design for HP's Romley generation of servers, selected by EMC for participation in Project Lightning, and LSI's Axxia multi-core processor has been adopted by the leading wireless equipment provider. LSI is forecasting revenue for Q1 2012 to be in the $550 - $590 million range. The SandForce acquisition closed on January 3, 2012 and will play a material role in LSI's growth this year.
January 25th, 2012 by Kevin OBrien
NVM Express Gets Windows Drivers and Test Suite
The NVM Express Workgroup announced that they have hit a milestone; a Microsoft Windows driver, Linux Driver, and an NVMe Test Suite. The NVMe specification is being used on many next-generation PCIe SSDs, from manufacturers such as OCZ. Last November, OCZ stated they would begin sampling devices with NVMe support this year, hinting towards a next-generation product that we now know is the OCZ Z-Drive R5 shown off at CES 2012.
January 24th, 2012 by Lyle Smith
DataCore and Hitachi Team Together to Make IT Management Easier
DataCore has announced that Hitachi IT Operations Analyzer from Hitachi Data Systems now provides detailed monitoring of DataCore SANsymphony-V environments. Enterprises will gain a holistic, single-pane view of their entire data center if a tight integration of the software is implemented, including virtualized storage resources, servers, networks and applications. This gives IT administrators the ability to easily maintain high levels of infrastructure availability, performance, as well as conducting fast problem diagnosis and resolution.
January 24th, 2012 by Brian Beeler
Fusion-io 2Q 2012 - $84.1 Million in Revenue, Over 10,000 ioDrive2 Drives Shipped
Fusion-io has announced their financial results for its fiscal second quarter of 2012 which ended December 31, 2011. Fusion-io reported revenue of $84.1 million, which is up from $31.2 million in the same quarter of the prior year, and up from $74.4 million in the prior quarter. The company is placing emphasis on their ioDrive2 storage solution which shipped over 10,000 units in the quarter. Looking ahead the company expects 3Q 2012 revenue to be approximately $85 million.
When we think about performance storage in the consumer space, most of us skip quickly to the enthusiast-grade SSDs, and for most usage scenarios, that makes sense. But there are cases when even the fastest SSDs don't provide enough throughput - enter RAM disks. Storage devices built around volatile RAM have been in use for some time, but with RAM getting both faster and less espensive, there's an increasingly viable case to be made for using RAM as a semi-permanent storage solution. In this case, we take a look at Patriot Memory's Viper XTreme Division 4 RAM as used in a RAM disk scenario.
At the beginning of this month Western Digital announced the My Book Live Duo, a two bay version of their popular My Book Live. When we 
Drobo claims their B800i SAN is the easiest to use iSCSI array on the market. Getting the B800i up and running is as simple as connecting the appropriate data and power cables, sliding in your array of drives, and firing up the setup application on your host system. Total time spent finding a place to put it on your shelf or carefully taking it out of the box is more than actually getting it setup for use. For businesses who know they need storage, but lack the IT staff or inclination to have to configure much of anything, the Drobo family of products tends to rise to the top of the short list. But let's not leave IT out in the cold, just because the Drobo units are easy to configure and use, doesn't mean IT can't like them too.
Iomega’s StorCenter PX4-300d is the successor to the ix4-200d, both of which are specifically built for small businesses that need to store a significant amount of data. All of the models in Iomega’s PX line have similar features but differ when it comes to the number of drives and the form factor. The PX4-300d and the px6-300d are desktop devices that support up to four drives and six drives respectively. The px4-300r model is a rack unit that supports up to four drives.
While generally not considered part of the storage ecosystem, networking gear plays a key role in transporting data from device to device. In this case we're taking a look at Netgear's latest high-performance router offering, the N900 (WNDR4500). The N900 offers all the wired and wireless standards, including 802.11 b/g/n on the 2.4 GHz spectrum and 802.11 a/n on the 5.0 GHz spectrum, which incidentally has had its range increased this time around. It also offers features like wireless printer sharing, and ReadyShare USB storage access, which can deliver HD video streams to wired or wireless media streamers around the house.