LSI

With the announcement of LSI's SAS 9300-8e and HGST's Ultrastar SSD800MM earlier this year, the world was officially introduced to 12 Gb/s SAS. Today we get our first look at how two times the interface bandwidth translates to real-world performance.

When it comes time to hunt down the ultimate in storage performance, you simply cannot settle for standard SSDs. Instead, look to PCI Express-based drives that circumvent the limitations of SATA. We have products from Fusion-io, LSI, and OCZ on the bench.

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.