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The advent of M.2 SSDs holds the promise of eliminating the SATA bottleneck and, while it may not seem that big of a deal for the typical consumer, improved performance to a media professional is pure gold. Faster transfer speeds translate into quicker job completion which realizes increased business and higher revenue. Although we have had M.2 SSDs in hand for some time now, the thrill of the chase is always there when watching to see who will get such and such a product to market, and into consumer hands first. When it comes to M.2 SSDs, short of those of us having the ioSwitch Raijin in hand, nobody would ever have guessed…
Everywhere you look, people are talking about SSDs (Solid State Drives) and their advantages. You may think that everybody has already replaced their hard drive with an SSD but you. This is far from the truth; what happens is that most memory manufacturers are putting a lot of effort on marketing SSDs basically because their profit margin on regular memory modules has dropped tremendously in the past few years. Add the price drop on memory itself, and SSDs seem to be a good idea for them to make more money. So a lot of people talking about SSDs don't mean that everybody is using SSDs, but that manufacturers are pushing people to talk about them.
Today for review iStar has sent me over the BPU-124V2-SS which allows you to put four 2.5” drives into the space of one 5.25” PC bay. The setup can be used for raid, or you can just use it as a hot swap rack to quickly and easily switch drives and transfer data to and from places. The cage itself is very nicely made, each bay locks individually and there's even two 40mm cooling fans built right in to keep things nice and cool.
iStarUSA is a company that I have become a big fan of over the years. They manufacture products that are higher than standard quality and pay attention to the people buying and using their products. iStartUSA has released a 4-Bay trayless RAID box and at first glance, it is sexy. The need for affordable and easy storage solutions is a quest that many of us have been on; let's see if the v7AGE420-ES can compete.
One of the things I’ve noticed over the years is that as time goes by consumer products get closer and closer to enterprise grade products both in terms of performance and reliability in an effort to cater the needs of professionals and enthusiasts alike. Certainly pure enterprise grade products will never have something to fear from high end consumer products since in the end we are talking about two entirely different markets with massively different price ranges but the gap between them is simply not what it was a decade ago. That combined with the continuous price drops on electronics in general are more than enough even for casual users to turn towards solutions that up until recently were primarily aimed towards professionals and enterprise users. Amongst such products are internal hot-swap drive cages and since 2.5" drives gain ground over their larger 3.5" brothers today we will be taking a look at the BPN-2535DE-SA 3.5" to 2x2.5" SATA 6Gb/s Hot-Swap Cage by iStarUSA.
A few years back when we didn't have 3/4TB drives and we were all struggling to make due with 320/500GB ones there was one thing pretty much every single person i know in the IT industry wanted and that was one or more hot-swap 5.25" storage adapters for 3.5" drives. That way everyone could insert a 3.5" drive, take a backup (or share files with friends), remove it and insert another one in just a few seconds (back then docking stations didn't really exist). Now things have changed and so to most people even a single 4TB drive is way too much, however we are not most people and the same can be said about professionals and enthusiasts around the globe. Unfortunately feature-rich and high quality 5.25" hot-swap storage adapters that can hold over three 3.5" drives are extremely hard to come by in the market today and if you are to sacrifice most if not all of your 5.25" drive bays you want to make the most out of it. iStarUSA designs and manufactures industrial grade products for the most demanding of users and lucky for us they also make some of the best 5.25" drive cages for both SATA II/III and SAS I/II drives like the BPN-DE340SS.
One of the many benefits of full tower PC cases are the many 5.25" optical drive bays they have (5 or more) so if you happen to own one there's no doubt you will most probably look for ways to make use of them. Personally i always use at least two in each of my test rigs one to mount a fan controller (two 5.25" bays sometimes) and the other to either mount a DVD-ROM or a Blu-Ray drive. Lately however we've started testing several 5.25" hard drive cages inside which you can mount up to four 3.5/2.5" SATA/SAS drives by making use of just three 5.25" optical drive bays. A few weeks back we tested the BPN-DE340SS hot-swap storage bay adapter by iStarUSA which not only managed to keep the temperatures of the SATA III drive we used for testing at a minimum but surprisingly enough it also improved its read/write data transfer speeds. Well today on our primary test rig we have it's cousin the BPU-340SATA military grade hot-swap drive cage.
For those that want speed and security from their hard drive, a solid state drive is your best option. The diskGenie 128gb is the mid ranged option out of iStorage's current range. They also sell a 30gb, 64gb, 240gb and 256gb; all of are priced differently at £140, £209, £689 and £919, respectively. iStorage claim that the diskGenie SSD is the world's most secure, smallest and affordable portable hard drive. With that in mind, let's see how the diskGenie does in the review...
Data security is a very important issue for some people. For internal hard drives there are many solutions available to ensure your drive cannot be accessed. However, for portable hard drives, there really are very few working solutions. One such apparent solution is iStorage’s diskGenie, a hardware encrypted portable hard drive which utilizes secure PIN code access. Let’s see how it performs…
Western Digital depends on the JMicron JMF612 Solid State Drive controller inside their WD SiliconEdge-Blue SSD to produce 250Mbps reads and 170Mbps write transfers. JMicron has also secured their JMF612 processor in the A-DATA S596, the upcoming Corsair Reactor SSD series, and the yet-to-ever-release Active Media Predator-X7. While the SSD industry grows daily, only a few select manufacturers offer popularly-accepted Flash NAND SSD controllers. In this article, Benchmark Reviews evaluates the JMicron JMF612 Solid State Drive processor.
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