One of the little known or little explored secrets with servers running VMware ESXi 5.x is they can be booted off of USB or SD flash media. In such a scenario, enterprises could dump HBAs or RAID cards and the hard drives or SSDs that are used to boot the servers. Going this route yields a CAPEX benefit

The Ultrastar Helium Platform (He6) hard drive family is HGST’s latest effort to provide the next step up in capacity for enterprises that are faced with ballooning data volumes. The Helium drives are offered at a single 6TB capacity point, which offers a 50% boost over today’s leading 4TB capacity offerings, and they are available with either

Micron/Crucial’s 20nm 128Gb MLC NAND was released in 2013 and hit the market in a consumable way as the first terabyte-class M500 SSD. The drive debuted at a price under $600 and proved to be a decent performer, though it is more a mainstream drive for consumers under the Crucial brand and for OEMs and system builders with the Micron flag. Today's release

The Fusion-io ioDrive2 Duo MLC is a full-height half-length (FHHL) application accelerator that provides up to 2.4TB of capacity via x8 PCI Express slot. Fusion-io cards are notorious for their throughput performance as well as their low latencies, the combination of which drives some of the best responsiveness in the industry. Fusion-io's ioDrive2 cards are all fundamentally all the

The LSI MegaRAID 9361-8i SAS3 RAID controller is a 12Gb/s storage adapter featuring PCIe 3.0 host interface, 1GB DDRIII cache memory, 1.2GHz PowerPC 476 dual core 12Gb/s ROC, and 8 12Gb/s SATA+SAS ports. With twice the maximum data transfer rate of 6Gb/s SAS solutions, the 9361-8i delivers enough bandwidth to fully saturate the PCI Express Gen3

The Seagate 1200 stakes a claim for the high-end enterprise SSD business as Seagate is part of the first wave of storage vendors to ship 12Gb/s SAS enterprise SSDs. The Seagate 1200 comes in 1.8-inch and 2.5-inch form factors, a 7mm z-height, and capacities up to 800GB. The 1200 series is a performance-oriented SSD the growing number of

The Toshiba PX02SS is a 2.5-inch enterprise SSD designed for transaction-intensive workloads including OLTP database applications and features a dual-port 12Gb/s SAS3 interface. The PX02SS and is available in 100GB, 200GB, 400GB, and 800GB capacities and offers notable write endurance among its class due to an overprovisioned Toshiba 24nm eMLC architecture. The Toshiba PX02SS is

The Toshiba PX02SM is an enterprise SSD which utilizes a dual port 12Gb/s SAS interface and eMLC NAND and achieved promising results in our early review of the drive. The PX02SM was the first 12Gb/s SAS SSD on the market, predating access to SAS3 adapters that could allow the StorageReview Enterprise Test Lab to measure its maximum

The Seagate Enterprise Turbo SSHD is a 2.5" 15K SAS HDD coupled with 32GB of eMLC flash that focuses on exceptional dollar-to-IOPS performance and capacity. With an estimated performance increase of 300% over a 15,000 RPM HDD, the Enterprise Turbo SSHD specializes in business-critical transactional environments (OLTP, VDI, SAP HANA), while also being considerably more