Thread: Anandtech News

Solid state storage has quickly been able to saturate the SATA interface just as quickly as new standards are introduced. The first generation of well-built MLC SSDs quickly bumped into the limits of 3Gbps SATA, as did the first generation of 6Gbps MLC SSDs. With hard drives no where near running out of headroom on a 6Gbps interface, it's clear that SSDs need to transition to an interface that can offer significantly higher bandwidth.
The obvious choice is PCI Express. A single PCIe 2.0 lane is good for 500MB/s of data upstream and downstream, for an aggregate of 1GB/s. Build a PCIe 2.0 x16 SSD and you're talking 8GB/s in either direction. The first PCIe 3.0 chipsets have already started shipping and they'll offer even higher bandwidth per lane (~1GB/s per lane, per direction).

Today Intel is announcing its first PCIe based solid state solution: the Intel SSD 910. Read on for our analysis of the announcement!


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NAS vendors in the high-end enterprise space often reserve the more powerful CPU configurations for their rackmount models. A case in point is QNAP's Xeon based 200TB+ storage rack solution which we saw at CES. Thecus is one of the very few vendors (if not the only one) to adopt the full range of Intel CPUs in their tower form factor systems.

Their previous generation enterprise tower models used Atom, Celeron and Core2-Duo CPUs. They topped out at 7-bays. Today, Thecus added some more members to update this lineup. The new members are the TopTower N6850, N8850 and N10850. They come with 6, 8 and 10 SATA bays respectively and run Thecus's custom NAS operating system. The table below compares the three models and the various features.

Thecus TopTower Lineup Comparison
Name	N6850	N8850	N10850
Description	6-bay desktop	8-bay desktop	10-bay desktop
CPU	Intel® Pentium® G620 2.6Ghz	Intel® Core™ i3 2120 3.3GHz	Intel® Xeon® E3-1225 3.1GHz
System Memory	2GB DDR3	4GB DDR3	4GB DDR3
HDD Interface	6 x SATA III	8 x SATA III	10 x SATA III
Ethernet	2 x RJ-45 [ Intel 82574L 10/100/1000 BASE-TX Auto MDI/MDI-X ]	2 x RJ-45 [ Intel 82574L 10/100/1000 BASE-TX Auto MDI/MDI-X ]	2 x RJ-45 [ Intel 82574L 10/100/1000 BASE-TX Auto MDI/MDI-X ]
USB Host Slots	4 x USB 2.0 / 4 x USB 3.0	4 x USB 2.0 / 4 x USB 3.0	4 x USB 2.0 / 4 x USB 3.0
PCIe Expansion	2 x PCIe x8 [ 10 GbE PCIe Card Compatible ]	2 x PCIe x8 [ 10 GbE PCIe Card Compatible ]	2 x PCIe x8 [ 10 GbE PCIe Card Compatible ]
Power Supply	80 PLUS Single Power Supply	80 PLUS Redundant Power Supply	80 PLUS Redundant Power Supply
Dimensions (HxWxD)	320.4 x 215 x 282.6 (mm)	380.4 x 235 x 282.6 (mm)	435.4 x 235 x 282.6 (mm)
Supported RAID Modes	RAID 0, 1, 5, 6, 10, 50 and JBOD	RAID 0, 1, 5, 6, 10, 50, 60 and JBOD	RAID 0, 1, 5, 6, 10, 50, 60 and JBOD

All the three models have a HDMI output at the back along with a MIC input, Line In and Audio Out. There are two hot swappable system fans and a touch panel for basic operations on the system without a computer. We have 256-bit AES encryption support for the RAID volumes.
There are iOS and Android apps available for monitoring and administration, uploading / downloading / streaming of multimedia files and file management. Supported cloud backup services include Dropbox, ElephantDrive, Amazon S3 (not at launch, but in a later firmware update) and Acronis. The firmware also ships with McAfee antivirus (compared to the open source ClamAV based solutions from other vendors).
The TopTower N6850, N8850 and N10850 are all schduled to ship in May 2012 with MSRPs of $1700, $2145 and $2480 respectively.



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Crucial has released a firmware update for its popular m4 SSD series. The update carries a version code of 000F. The update is said to improve compatibility with certain SAS expanders and RAID cards but Crucial is also claiming better throughput stability (i.e. performance) under heavy loads and enhanced data protection in the event of power loss.
It appears that the update is aimed more towards enterprise users than consumers because SAS expanders and RAID cards are primarily enterprise products. Consumer workloads are usually lighter and may not benefit from the improved throughput stability at heavy loads. Power-loss protection is welcomed by all users, however, as an unexpected power-loss may happen in any environment.
Crucial offers both a Windows 7 updater and traditional ISO file for upgrading the firmware. While the update is non-destructive in nature, we always recommended that you backup your important data before flashing the drive. The update can be downloaded here.



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Intel officially launched the Z77 platform earlier this week, and later this month we'll see the official launch of Ivy Bridge, Intel's 3rd generation Core processors. ASUS has agreed to cart nearly everything it makes (including a handful of unreleased products we saw at CES) over to me in NC for a hands on look on video. More importantly - we're going to be doing a Q&A with you all.
ASUS and I will both be answering your questions on camera. If you have any questions you'd like to see us answer or topics you'd like us to address, respond to the comments here or mention @anandtech with the hashtag #asusivy on Twitter along with your question/topic. We won't be able to get to all of them but we'll pick the most interesting/relevant questions and answer them on camera. The topic is obviously going to be Ivy Bridge and the 7-series platform. Simple questions are fine but what I'd really like to see are topics we can have a good discussion about.
When the video goes live, ASUS is also going to let us give away some new Z77 boards as well. We'll have more details on the giveaway closer to the Ivy Bridge launch.

Make the questions good and I look forward to answering them on camera.


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A few months ago during the Radeon HD 7970 launch we discussed how AMD would be revising their ISV relations. While their efforts with ISVs in the past few years had been decent, AMD had not put a lot of money into it, and what money they did have was controlled by a relatively large bureaucracy. Consequently their efforts paled in comparison to NVIDIA’s, who put in far more money and effort into the process.
As a result one of AMD’s reforms for 2012 was going to be that they were going to put more money into ISV relations in order to catch up to NVIDIA. And while our discussion with the 7970 last year focused on the gaming side of things, AMD is also throwing more money behind ISV relations for their professional graphics business. After hitting a significant low against NVIDIA’s Quadro lineup, AMD’s market share for professional graphics has rebounded based on the strength of their 40nm DX11 GPUs, and AMD is looking to keep that momentum going with these improved ISV relations.
The first such major partnership of the year is with Parametric Technology Corporation (PTC), a firm specializing in product lifecycle management software and CAD/CAM software. Earlier this month PTC launched their Creo 2.0 suite of applications, of which AMD has had a significant hand in helping PTC optimize. Specifically, AMD’s ISV group has been working on Creo Parametric 2.0, PTC’s CAD/CAM application.

With Creo Parametric 2.0, AMD and PTC have added support for a couple new features intended to significantly boost performance. The first is Order Independent Transparency, which you may recall from the launch of the Radeon HD 5870 back in 2009. Order independent transparency allows for quickly assembling a frame containing multiple transparent elements without sorting them first. In this case it allows Creo Parametric 2.0 to do accurate per-pixel transparency ordering at a much faster rate than in standard blending.
The other feature AMD helped PTC add was support for Vertex Buffer Objects, more commonly known as VBOs. As the name implies, VBOs are buffers of vertex data, the significance being that VBOs allow for vertex data to be stored as objects in VRAM rather than streamed to the video card during the rendering process. In situations with a great deal of polygons – and hence vertex data – VBOs can significantly speed up rendering, which is what PTC is doing in Creo Parametric 2.0 by using VBOs to speed up viewport performance. Like order independent transparency this isn’t a new idea – in fact it’s been around since OpenGL 2.1 – but this is a good example of how slowly CAD/CAM software adopts new technology compared to consumer applications.

As far as performance goes, AMD and PTC are looking at upwards of 9x the performance of PTC’s older software when it comes to transparency-bottlenecked situations, and a 5x improvement in viewport performance in situations similarly bound by vertex performance. Both of these changes are rather small elements of the complete rendering pipeline for Creo Parametric, however as far as AMD is concerned this is a great example for how offloading work to the GPU and making small optimizations can have a huge impact. And as a case study it's one they will no doubt be using to drive future ISV partnerships.



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Extreme budget enclosures are interesting creatures. While the best balancing acts usually show up around the $100 price point, and going north of $150 will generally get you the best of everything, hanging out at $60 or lower means having to make a lot of sacrifices and lose a lot of niceties. For some users that's not a big deal; they just want a box to put their computer in.

Fractal Design has been making a lot of waves with their lineup of minimalistic but effective enclosures, but most of those kits have been $80 or more. Today we have their Core 1000, a fascinating-looking case that retails for just $39.99. Does it bring the same magic to this end of the market that Fractal Design has brought with their other efforts, or has too much been left on the cutting room floor?


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A short time after the Lumia 900 went on sale, users started reporting data connectivity issues affecting both 3G HSPA+ and 4G LTE on AT&T. Although I didn't encounter these on my review unit, Nokia acknowledged the issue a short time after and stated that an update would be available on April 16th, in addition to a $100 credit through April 21st.

Today, Nokia has beat its own estimates and made the Lumia 900 update available through Zune and the Mac desktop connector for Windows Phone 7. This update resolves the memory management issue that led to intermittent cellular data on the Lumia 900 previously.
Source: Nokia



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Just three months ago we took GeChic's 13" USB 2.0-powered monitor, the On-Lap 1301, for a test run. What we found was a compelling concept for a product that was marred by some usability issues. Apparently we weren't the only ones who felt like the On-Lap needed a revision; the On-Lap 1301 proved successful, but it wasn't on the market for very long before being replaced by the new On-Lap 1302.

The big question is: just how much can be revised over the course of just a few months? The answer is more than you'd think, but less than you'd hope.


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There was a time when Western Digital's Raptor (and later, the VelociRaptor) was a staple of any high-end desktop build. Rotational media could only deliver better performance by increasing aereal density or spindle speed. In a world dominated by hard drives that focused on the former, WD decided to address both. By shipping the only 3.5" hard drive with a 10,000 RPM spindle speed, WD guaranteed that if you needed performance, the Raptor line was the way to go.
Two years ago we met the most recent update to the VelociRaptor line: the VR200M. While it raised the bar for the VelociRaptor, WD saw its flagship competing in a new world. SSDs were now more affordable, resulting in even more desktop builds including an SSD. Although the high dollar-per-GB cost associated with SSDs demanded that desktop users adopt a two-drive model (SSD + HDD), for storage of large media files a standard 5400RPM or 7200RPM drive was just fine. After all, moving large files is mostly a sequential operation which plays to the strengths of most consumer drives to begin with.
There are still users who need more storage than an SSD can affordably provide, and who demand speed as well. Although photo and video editing is great on an SSD, a big enough project would have difficulty sharing a 128GB SSD with an OS, applications and other data. For those users who still need high performance storage that's more affordable than an SSD, the VelociRaptor is still worthy of consideration. There's just one problem: Moore's Law is driving the cost of SSDs down, and their capacities up. The shift to solid state storage is inevitable for most, but to remain relevant in the interim the VelociRaptor needed an update.
Today Western Digital is doing just that. This is the new VelociRaptor, available in 250GB, 500GB and 1TB capacities:

Read on for our full review!

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We reported on Intel's SSD 330 weeks ago, but today is the official announcement of the drive and its availability in the channel. Unlike previous 300 series drives, the 330 isn't based on Intel's own controller - it's the second SandForce SF-2281 drive in Intel's lineup.

Read on for our full analysis of the announcement.


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