- Application Accelerator
- SSD
- HDD
- Large Enterprise Storage
- Medium SAN/NAS (12+ bays)
- Small SAN/NAS (up to 8 bays)
- Backup and Recovery
- Attached Storage
- Storage Adapters
- Networking
- Server Rack
- Server
- Power Management
- Software
- Accessories
May 8th, 2013 by Josh Shaman
Toshiba SATA HDD Enterprise 3.5" Review (MG03ACAx00)
Toshiba's new MG03 SATA enterprise 3.5" hard drives are now being offered as standard or encrypted models in the industry's highest capacity ranging up to 4TB while spinning at 7,200RPM with a SATA 6Gb/s interface. As we noted in our recent review of the MG03 4TB SAS, Toshiba has seen increasing demand for encryption and as such, they will now be offering it across all of their new models. As with the sibling SAS drives, the SATA drives offer a big jump in capacity to 4TB from 2TB as well as up to 18% faster sustained transfer rates and power consumption reduced significantly by up to 15%. Rounding out the enhancements, this new generation of SATA drives now interface over 6Gb/s SATA instead of 3Gb/s.
May 7th, 2013 by Kevin OBrien
Seagate 600 Pro Enterprise SSD Review
The Seagate 600 Pro SSD is a 2.5-inch MLC NAND enterprise-class SSD in a 7mm form factor with a capacity up to 480GB that is designed for read-intensive applications. Due to its size, the 600 Pro easily fits almost any platform, maximizing capacity while minimizing its footprint. Seagate's primary focus during the engineering of this drive though was to build a drive to meet the growing demand within the enterprise for SSDs that offer enterprise-class endurance and adequate performance at a reasonable price-point. Organizations that need these types of drives include centers, cloud system builders, cloud service providers or virtualized enterprises. In these applications, the enterprise requires more endurance than they could get with a client SSD; it wants a drive upon which it can depend to be reliable over time, thus keeping data secure.
May 1st, 2013 by Josh Shaman
LaCie 5big NAS Pro Review
The 5big NAS Pro is LaCie’s latest NAS featuring the Neil Poulton design users are long familiar with as well as an updated 2.13GHz dual-core Intel 64-bit Atom processor and an impressive 4GB of RAM. LaCie utilizes their own LaCie NAS OS3 in this model, diverging from the Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 Essentials in the 5big Office + NAS. The updated OS offers a single user interface for local and cloud storage creating a hybrid cloud via Wuala (the cloud provider with which LaCie merged a few years back). Hardware features include five drive bays, a solid aluminum structure, and plenty of connectivity via USB 3.0 and gigabit Ethernet ports. Designed for small businesses, LaCie's target market is offices with up to 50 concurrent users.
April 30th, 2013 by Josh Shaman
Seagate Enterprise Value HDD (Constellation CS) Review
The Seagate Enterprise Value HDD which is also known as the Constellation CS, is a 3.5", 7,200RPM SATA drive with a maximum capacity of 3TB that is targeted at organizations looking for the cost-effectiveness of consumer HDDs but also the enterprise features they need. The Constellation CS fit those needs by offering inexpensive bulk-storage for cases such as hosting unstructured data in the cloud with the lowest $/GB cost in the market. Adding to the Constellation CS drives' overall value is that at 2.75W/TB, it also offers the lowest power consumption of any new enterprise-class HDD, drawing up to 29% less power than competitive high-capacity enterprise drives by Seagate's numbers.
April 26th, 2013 by Kevin OBrien
Lenovo ThinkServer RD530 Review
The Lenovo ThinkServer RD530, the 1U sibling to the 2U RD630 we previously reviewed, is a mainstream server designed with the specs users need to support database applications as well as virtualized infrastructures. The RD530 offers essentially the same hardware and options as the RD630 in half the space. The ThinkServer RD530 runs on the Intel Xeon E5-2600 processor family and can support up to 320GB of RAM. One major difference is how many drives are supported. The RD530 offers slots for up to four LFF HDDs or eight SFF SATA, SAS or SSDs, while the RD630 could support up to sixteen SFF drives.
April 24th, 2013 by Josh Shaman
Toshiba SAS HDD Enterprise 3.5" Review (MG03SCAx00)
Toshiba's new MG03 SAS Enterprise 3.5" hard drives offer a 7,200 RPM spindle speed with top-of-the-line capacities up to 4TB and SAS 6Gb/s interface in either standard or encrypted (SED) models. The encryption feature is part of a push Toshiba is mounting to provide more security options across all new drives. The MG03 SAS Enterprise drives present a host of updates compared to the previous generation. Toshiba expanded capacities up to 4TB from 2TB, and the MG03 SAS drives now offer up to 18% faster sustained transfer rates while shaving power consumption up to 15%. Additionally, the drives offer cache buffers of 64MB, which is a significant bump from the previously offered 16MB buffers. The drives also offer error correction (ECC) for more reliability. All told, the lastest MG03 offering is on more even terms with other leading drives in the high-capacity enterprise SAS space and aims to be a viable option in a market long dominated by other drive vendors.
April 19th, 2013 by Kevin OBrien
SMART Storage CloudSpeed 500 Enterprise SSD Review
The SMART Storage Systems CloudSpeed 500 is an entry enterprise SSD with SATA interface designed to meet the needs read-intensive scenarios such as boot drive, workstations and certain embedded applications. The CloudSpeed 500 uses a SandForce controller paired with 24nm MLC NAND to deliver not just high throughput, but also high endurance. It can be difficult to differentiate with SandForce-based SSDs, as the build and firmware are rarely novel. With that in mind, Smart's hook with the CloudSpeed 500 is the endurance. Smart touts 15,000 PE cycles, which is more than some other SandForce-based offerings, and it does this all while preserving capacity with just 7% over-provisioning. The drive also offers power-fail protection to ensure in-flight data makes it to its destination during a power loss event.
April 16th, 2013 by Josh Shaman
HGST Ultrastar 7K4000 Review (HUS724040ALE640)
HGST's Ultrastar 7K4000 3.5" form factor enterprise-class HDD now ranges up to 4TB in capacity and spins at 7,200RPM while interfacing over SATA 6Gb/s. The drive offers the enterprise a 33% capacity leap over previous models, and it accomplishes that task of delivering robust capacity by utilizing five platters at 800GB each to attain the maximum 4TB capacity. This is a huge feature for enterprise customers who need to maintain the same footprint for their drives without increasing their costs. Another significant feature on the Ultrastar 7K4000 is that it is offered in Advanced Format which uses a 4096-byte sector size that is still backward-compatible with the 512-byte sector size. The HGST 7K4000 drive also features 64MB of drive cache.
April 12th, 2013 by Kevin OBrien
OCZ Deneva 2 Enterprise SSD Review
The OCZ Deneva 2 is an enterprise-class SSD that interfaces over SATA 6GB/s and has several different models utilizing an array of NAND. Our test model incorporates eMLC NAND to offer users more write cycles than standard MLC, and simultaneously it provides economics closer to MLC than the more expensive SLC. The Deneva 2 also comes in two different series to provides users flexibility in their choices. The R series includes a similar feature set to the C series but with a couple of additional features including power loss data protection and over-provisioning. The over-provisioning is geared more toward heavier write scenarios and is noticeable when users check capacity differences between the C and R models. Our test model is the OCZ Deneva 2 R eMLC NAND 200GB capacity drive. One more design note is that architecturally, the Deneva 2 comes in a 2.5" form factor, but OCZ can tailor it per application.
April 12th, 2013 by Brian Beeler
Dell EqualLogic Family Hands-On
We recently spent a few days at the Dell EqualLogic headquarters in Nashua, NH to experience a deep dive on the EqualLogic family, management software and performance capabilities of the arrays. The EqualLogic full-immersion treatment was to prepare us for the latest generation EqualLogic PS6110 array to hit our lab for full review in the coming weeks. We split time between detailed briefings on features like Linux management and VMware integration and several hours of in-lab time working hands on with the entire PS (peer storage) family ranging from the entry-level PS4110 to the full-on PS6110 hybrid array that combines flash storage with 15K hard drives.
