OCZ Comienza el envío de SSDs SAS

OCZ Begins to Ship SAS SSD with Latest VCA 2.0 Controller Architecture.

OCZ's New Talos SAS SSD Available for "Strategic" and B2B Customers

OCZ Technology Group this week said that its latest Talos solid-state drive (SSD) with Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) and new virtualized controller architecture (VCA) 2.0 technology is now available for strategic and business-to-business customers. The well-known supplier of SSDs positions Talos drives for enterprise applications with mixed workloads.

The refreshed Talos-series solid-state drives in 3.5" form-factor are available in up to 960GB capacities and with SAS-6Gb/s interface. The new SSDs deliver mixed-workload performance with up to 66 000 IOPS (burst) and 50 000 sustained read/write IOPS with incompressible 4K files sizes, and 34 000 sustained mixed read/write IOPS with incompressible 8K files. As a result, Talos is a full duplex SAS solution for applications that may benefit from increased 8K and 16K sustained IOPS, including databases which use a default block size of 8K, or increased incompressible performance such as the growing need of datacenters to provide fast access to compressed video and audio files.

Thanks to SAS interface enables easy deployment with existing devices and appliances and the drives themselves provide clients with world-class reliability features including superior power loss protection, endurance, encryption, and ECC protection.

OCZ's Talos with VCA 2.0 technology provides customers with a robust enterprise feature-set while substantially increasing mixed workload performance. Talos now utilizes VCA 2.0's unique command queuing and queue balance algorithms to address the demands of today's I/O intensive enterprise applications, which require high levels of sustained IOPS and bandwidth, across file sizes and read/write ratios. While traditional SAS SSDs can only perform one read or write at a time, OCZ Talos drives with VCA 2.0, can read and write simultaneously, substantially increasing performance.

"The OCZ Talos series of SAS solid state drives now leverages our proprietary VCA 2.0 to boost transactional performance and provide a complete range of enhanced features, making it the ideal drop in replacement for multiple hard drives in enterprise storage systems. With superior mixed-workload performance Talos SSDs provide clients with increased throughput and flexibility to address their most demanding enterprise storage applications," said Ryan Petersen, chief executive officer of OCZ Technology Group.

The refreshed Talos-series with VCA 2.0 is now available for strategic customers in capacities up to 960GB, and the drives will be made available to SMB and enterprise clients through OCZ's business-to-business channel.

Fuente: http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/storage/display/20110727235341_OCZ_Begins_to_Ship_SAS_SSD_with_Latest_VCA_2_0_Controller_Architecture.html

MSI Muestra su Motherboard Big Bang Marshal

MSI shows off its Big Bang Marshal board

The king of the P67 boards?

WHAT DO YOU do as a motherboard manufacturer when you have to come up with a flagship product that is unlike anything your competitors have? Well, in the case of MSI you create the Big Bang Marshal, a monster of a board that features no less than eight x16 PCI Express slots in an XL-ATX form factor.

The first and most obvious question is how MSI managed to get enough bandwidth for eight x16 PCI Express slots and the simple answer is, they didn’t. The more complex answer is that the board has four slots with x16 bandwidth and if you want to use all eight slots, they operate at x8 bandwidth. This is still way more bandwidth than the Sandy Bridge processors offer and MSI didn’t use a pair of nF200 chips either, instead the Big Bang Marshal uses a new Lucid Hydra chip that we sadly don’t have any specific details on at this moment, but from what we understood, this time around we’re talking about a bridge chip rather than a solution that allows for mix and match graphics cards to work in tandem.

It’s not hard to see that MSI has tried its best to create something out of the ordinary with the Big Bang Marshal and so far it’s one of the most impressive P67 boards we’ve seen in terms of features. One thing that caught our attention was four dip switches at the front of the board which are labelled PCI-E CeaseFire. Each switch corresponds to one of the four x16 PCI Express slots and allows the slots to be manually switched off. This is meant to be a feature that some overclockers have requested for when they’re using multiple graphics cards in a board. As for the blue block of four dip switches, it’s referred to as a V-switch and has something to do with Voltage adjustments.

The Big Bang Marshl features a 24 phase DrMOS PWM design and some of the components have been moved to the rear of the PCB, a very unusual solution on a large motherboard such as this. In addition to the regular 8-pin 12V connector, MSI has added a second 8-pin 12V connector and a 6-pin 12V connector near the PCI Express slots. The power regulation components across the board appears to be way over spec and in a way it’s a shame that this is a P67 board as we can’t really see all the extra hardware being taken advantage of in the same way as it would’ve been on say an X58 board. There are even a few potentiometers spread around the board indicating some kind of manual control over at least some of the power regulation circuitry.

As far as other features are concerned, you’re looking at four SATA 3Gbps ports, four SATA 6Gbps ports (two via a Marvell 9128 controller), no less than three BIOS chips with a manual switch, two USB 3.0 pin headers for four ports, three USB 2.0 pin headers for six ports, a POST80 debug LED display, a FireWire header, a serial port header and a few pin headers we’re not quite sure what they’re for, as well as a power, reset and OC Genie buttons and a multimeter measurement point.

Around the back the Big Bang Marshal has a PS/2 port, two USB 2.0 ports, eight USB 3.0 ports (using a single host controller and two hubs), two USB 2.0/eSATA combo ports, a FireWire port, a pair of Gigabit Ethernet ports and 7.1-channel audio with optical and coaxial S/PDIF out. We presume the little button is a CMOS reset button, but we couldn’t make out any labelling, so it’s possibly for something else.

Be aware that this isn’t the final board design, so some changes might still take place before this board launches sometime in the middle of Q1 next year, but if anything we’d expect more rather than less features on the final board. We asked about the PLX bridge chip located just below the chipset heatsink, but didn’t get a definite answer as to what it was for, as an example of features that might change. The board will feature MSI’s ClickBIOS which is MSI speak for UEFI and MSI will also provide software X-Fi audio and a range of other software features. If it’s not obvious by now, the Big Bang Marshal isn’t for your average user, but we can see MSI stealing a few customers away from Asus and Gigabyte simply based on the number of features on offer here. No word on pricing as yet though, but we’d expect this to be one of the most expensive P67 boards.S|A

Fuente: http://semiaccurate.com/2010/12/28/msi-shows-its-big-bang-marshal-board/

Comparativa de performance: Superspeed Flash Drives USB 3.0

USB 3.0 Flash Drive Roundup

A brief history of USB Flash Drives

Developed in the early 1990s by Compaq, DEC, IBM, Microsoft, Intel, Nortel, and NEC, Universal Serial Bus is today the de facto peripheral interface standard. It has almost entirely replaced earlier interfaces like the serial and parallel ports. USB also relegated most external storage media like floppy and Zip disks to obsolescence, due to the utilization of the USB interface by flash and external hard drive manufacturers. USB 1.0, launched in 1996, specified 12Mbits/s “Full Speed” data transfer rates between devices and the host computer, though it did not see widespread adoption. 1998 saw the release of USB 1.1, which maintained the same 12Mbits/s transfer rate, and was the first widely adopted USB standard.

I remember happily paying over $100 for a 32MB flash drive in the fall of 1999 because I could fit an entire semester’s assignments, articles, and papers on a single gadget the size of a pack of gum – and it was also durable – my first flash drive survived three trips through the washing machine. Though it’s hard to imagine someone not recognizing a flash drive now, back then other students occasionally came up to me at the Fishbowl to ask “What is that blinking light thingy you plugged into the computer?” While the earliest flash drives were handy, they were agonizingly slow – even accounting for their diminutive capacities.

The widespread adoption of USB devices (over 10 billion in the wild) is largely due to the development of USB 2.0. The USB 2.0 specification was released in 2000, and boasts a 480Mbits/s data transfer rate. Though USB 2.0 devices rarely approach this theoretical throughput maximum, USB 2.0 is far less patience-trying than USB 1.1, and googling (or binging or yahooing) 'novelty flash drive' reveals there's a flash drive for every interest imaginable. However, in 2000 when USB 2.0 was introduced, a 20GB hard drive was ‘huge.’ Today, a 2TB hard drive costs less than $100, and copying 1,000GB+ over USB 2.0 is a not particularly exciting all-night affair.

Like USB 2.0 before it, USB 3.0 offers dramatically improved data transfer rates compared to its predecessor. Though specifications were announced in late 2008, consumer devices didn’t start ‘hitting the street’ until the beginning of 2010. USB 3.0 specifies transfer rates up to 5Gbit/s, compared to USB 2.0’s 480Mbits/s. USB 3.0 devices are downward compatible with USB 2.0 ports. Because of the ubiquity of USB 2.0 ports and relative rarity of USB 3.0 ports, this is an important consideration. Unfortunately, plugging a USB 3.0 device into a USB 2.0 port yields USB 2.0 transfer rates. Fortunately, computers with USB 3.0 ports are becoming increasingly common. Many newer laptops have at least one such port. USB 3.0 port expansion cards are available to upgrade older systems, and many newer motherboards feature two or more USB 3.0 jacks. Cases with front USB 3.0 ports are still rare, as are motherboards with USB 3.0 front port headers, but these will only become more common as time passes.

Anand reviewed an array of USB 2.0 flash drives back in 2005. He found that performance between different manufacturers and different models was quite variable. Because manufacturers often do not provide hard data regarding their drives’ performance, or sometimes provide ‘idealized’ transfer rates that don’t equal real-world capabilities, choosing between flash drives is problematic. We compare here a number of USB 2.0 and 3.0 drives in multiple ways, including synthetic performance tests and real-world use scenarios.

Fuente y nota completa: http://www.anandtech.com/show/4523/usb-30-flash-drive-roundup