Manuel Masiero

We got our hands on four SAS 6 Gb/s RAID controllers from Adaptec, Areca, HighPoint, and LSI and ran them through RAID 0, 5, 6, and 10 workloads to test their mettle. Does your system need eight more ports of connectivity? We can answer that!

Hard drives able to hold 3 TB of data need to be considered carefully because they might not always work as expected. This round-up of four high-capacity disks compares products from Hitachi, Seagate, and Western Digital, then covers their caveats.

Currently, 2.5" enterprise drives are leaving their 3.5” competitors behind. They're faster, more flexible, and now they offer comparable capacities (we're up to 1 TB now). In this piece, it's Hitachi versus Seagate battling for high-density supremacy.

Version 7.0a of TrueCrypt offers many new features, including hardware-accelerated AES encryption via processors that support the technology. We discuss the new features and look at the performance impact of running an encrypted system partition.

We repeat our extreme SSD RAID project for the third time and arrange 16 Samsung 470-series SSDs based on MLC NAND in a RAID 0 array to reach new levels of performance. We weren't as fortunate this time, but not for the reasons you might suspect.

RAID arrays with dozens of hard drives are not uncommon for reaching certain performance levels. We demonstrate how beautifully SSD RAID arrays can scale. There may come a time when a few flash-based drives will replace entire farms of hard disks.

Mini-ITX-based systems are attractive because they generally combine low-power operation and decent performance in a small package. But you need a good case to accommodate the restrictions of compact hardware. Today we try five different Mini-ITX cases.

With the right know-how, you can copy VHS and Super-8 movies to your PC. This workshop will also show you how to give your old movies a new, digital lease on life.