This week had a few interesting storage related items worthy of the digest from ATTO, Corsair, Apple/Intel, Acer and a public service announcement about subscribing to ServeTheHome.com’s RSS feeds. The next few weeks should be somewhat more exciting review wise here so updating your RSS feed may be worthwhile.
ATTO Released ExpressSAS v2.10
ATTO, the maker of both RAID cards and SandForce’s favorite benchmark has released a new version of ExpressSAS to customers. Benefits appear to be:
- Up to 60% better performance over v2.10
- Marvell Port Multiplier Support
- NCQ is being implemented in CacheAssure mode
- SAS Multiplexing is enabled when using 3.0gbps drives on 6.0gbps SAS controllers.
You can get the update and information on ExpressSAS v2.10 here.
Corsair’s Great Communication Around the 25nm NAND Change
Corsair has transitioned to 25nm NAND and posted a bit on their blog about it. Kudos for Corsair being forthcoming with the switch to 25nm NAND and its implications. One thing they are doing is relabling the F120 drive the F115. Here is a quick example:
“120GB Force SSDs: We currently have an F120 in the market that is based on 34nm technology. We have just launched an F115 “-A” SSD that is based on 25nm technology. As mentioned before, the reduced capacity is due to increased overhead required by the new technology. Along with the reduced size, the F115 “-A” is about $15 less expensive than the F120 at the time this article was published.”
Again, great job on the public relations Corsair. Being forthright with customers is always a best practice in the long run.
Apple Announces New MacBook Pro’s with Sandy Bridge and Thunderbolt
Apple finally announced its early-2011 MacBook Pro lineup. Some big notes here were of course the switch to Sandy Bridge and NVIDIA being left out of the equation. The 13″ MacBook Pro utilizes only the onboard Sandy Bridge GPU while the 15″ and 17″ models use AMD GPUs. I may have picked up the 11.6″ MacBook Air with the upgraded RAM, SSD, and CPU in November 2010, but if Apple released a Sandy Bridge version I would have an order in today. Finally Apple has caught up with the 2010’s and ditched the Core 2 Duo.
One of the big features was the Thunderbolt port that basically acts as a 10.0gbps interface and a DisplayPort connection all-in-one. There are quite a few sites out there proclaiming the death of eSATA 6.0gbps and USB 3.0. At this point, USB has tons of great and inexpensive devices out for it, and SATA 6.0gbps is probably not too threatened by a 10.0gbps interface, at least not yet. SFF-8088 cables provide four 6.0gbps lanes for an aggregate bandwidth greater than two 10.0gbps interfaces, and is a mature interface.
Both the Promise Pegasus RAID and LaCie Little Big Disk were Thunderbolt peripherals announced with the new MacBook Pro’s and they do look interesting since SFF-8088 ports are impossible to find on modern notebooks. These are probably worth keeping an eye on at this point, but it will be some time before Thunderbolt becomes fully mainstream.
Acer America Released New Storage Servers
In partnership with Hitachi Data System, Acer released new NAS servers such as the AN1600 F1 which is a Xeon dual socket Windows Storage Server 2008 machine. It looks like all the new new models are not up yet but one can see Acer’s storage line here. Frankly, I wish Microsoft developed Windows Storage Server a bit more with features like software RAID 6 so that those features could eventually find their way into non-WSS 2008 lines.
FeedBurner for ServeTheHome.com Feeds!
Terry at wegotserved sent me a note telling me I needed to switch my RSS to FeedBurner or a similar service. I posted a bit about this in the forums earlier this week, but many may have missed this. Needless to say, I finally did it so now anyone wanting the ServeTheHome.com feeds can use their favorite (FeedBurner) supported service or even sign up for an e-mail digest. This was a necessary change and the new feed will be at http://feeds.feedburner.com/ServeTheHome
To discuss this news and more, visit the ServeTheHome.com Forums!
