When we see the name Intel come about, the first thing that rightly comes to mind is their supreme processor department, but what some people may not know is that this is not all they now produce. Along with their many lines of processors, they also produce motherboards and Solid State Drives.

With the technological abilities they have to produce the high end components, it comes as no surprise that our initial expectations of this drive when it came in were very high especially from what we’ve seen of their 320 series SATA II and 510 Series drives in the past.

The 520 series drives are designed to bring a whole new level of performance to the market with drives that can give a random read performance of up to 50,000 input/output operations per second (IOPS) and a sequential read of upto 550MB/s. The impressive read speeds are paired with random writes up to 80,000 IOPS and a sequential write of upto 520MB/s. Speed is not the only thing this drive has to offer, data security and integrity is another key feature and with the drive offering a pre-configured 256-bit AES along with End to End Data Protection, you can be rest assured your data is safe and secure.

Here at the eTeknix headquarters, we try to stay as current as possible in terms of the machines used to test components.

The only thing that has really been holding us back as of late was our SSDs which were being run by a single 128GB Kingston V+ 100 SSD.

Not only was the speed and performance a problem, but the capacity was restricting us too, especially when it came to installing intensive benchmark software that can sometimes be almost 20GB per application.

Our good friends at Kingston have now graced us with FIVE Kingston HyperX 240GB SSDs for use in testing, so expect these to be installed in our test machines VERY soon.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Marvell has today introduced its new line of SATA 6 Gbps controllers, in the number of three, they’re featured under the 88SE92 Series. These are the 2-port 88SE9220, 4-port 88SE9230 and 4-port 88SE9235.

All three of them take advantage of the new PCI-Express 2.0 x2 interface, until now hypothetically impossible without any slot specifications from PCI-SIG. However, with the constantly growing demand for system bandwidth, low pin-counts and package size, PCIe 2.0 x2 has finally emerged as a viable solution, as for PCIe 3.0, it’s still rather ‘young’.

With PCIe 2.0 x2, controller now have a system bandwitdh of 1000 MB/s per direction, resulting in 2000 MB/s total, which now ensures the connected SATA 6 Gbps devices won’t face bottleneck at a given time (something that was impossible on older PCIe 2.0 x1 chips).

In addition, the new ‘bottleneck-avoiding’ system bandwidth now also allows the added support for up to four SATA 6 Gbps ports (88SE9230 and 88SE9235). Furthermore, port multipliers is also supported on all three models.

Starting at the top-of-the-line we have the 88SE9230, supporting Marvell RAID software, HyperDuo (Marvell’s in-house SSD caching technology), RAID 0, 1, 10 modes, AHCI, and 128/256-bit AES native encryption.

Lower we have the cost-effective version of the 88SE9230, the 88SE9235, which lacks RAID and features AHCI/IDE modes only (therefore also lacking encryption).

As for the 2-port 88SE9220, if has all the features the 88SE9230 has, with the exception of RAID 10 (as you may know, impossible with just two drives).

As for pin-count and size, Marvell was able to keep the 4-port chip as low as 76 pins with a package size of 9 mm². The 2-port chip is similar to the existing chips at 7 mm². It’s also possible these new chips will make it to the upcoming LGA1155 motherboards based on Intel’s “Panther Point” 7-series chipset.

Here is a sum up of the specifications for each controller:

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I had never really used ASRock boards in the past, on a personal level, and only being in charge of motherboard reviews saw me having a glance at their potential. After looking at their Z68 boards, I instantly knew they had something special going on. X79 confirmed this, when we looked at the X79 Extreme4 which was one of the best looking boards that had passed through my hands. It also showed great performance and utilised the new X79 structure in terms of benchmarking, overclocking and a nice, easy to use UEFI BIOS.

After concluding the Extreme4 with our “Editor’s Choice” award, we were extremely keen to see what the other boards in the X79 range were capable of, as the Extreme4 comes in as an entry level motherboard in ASRock’s X79 product lineup.

Today sees us taking a look at their top-end Extreme9 X79 board, which offers up a full ATX form factor layout, with eight DDR3 DIMM slots, and a whopping five PCI-Express x16 slots ready for the most extreme gaming experience.

Whilst this board isn’t aimed specifically at gamers, it looks to be more than capable to push things to the extreme, and with a product marketed into the “Overclock King” range of boards, we’re more than aware of the overclocking ability that this board should include. Due to that, we wanted to get straight into looking at how this board can cope with our 3960X Extreme Edition processor cooled by the Corsair H80 and 16GB of Corsair Vengeance DDR3 memory. It all seems to be a match made in heaven, at least on paper, so let’s get to it and start with taking a look at what ASRock offer in this extreme motherboard, for extreme users.

No matter who you are, you should be more than aware of SanDisk, whether you have a camera or a mobile phone that takes a memory card, you would have most likely used a SanDisk memory card at some point. What you may not know is that SanDisk were one of the first to release an SSD to the general market with the U5000 32GB SSD back in 2007.

Since this time, SanDisk went a bit quiet on the SSD front and have had their focus on other areas of the market, mainly with mass producing memory cards and similar based products. 2011 however, we see them returning to the SSD market with the SanDisk Ultra SATA II Solid State Drive.

The Ultra may not jump out at you when you hear that it utilises a SATA II interface, but it’s worth noting that the average user out there doesn’t even know what SATA III is, let alone having it on their system. The cold hard truth is that the majority of computers in the mass market only have SATA II capabilities, so why flood the market?

With that out the way, it’s worth looking at the main area of this drive, which is all about the internals as you’d expect. Not only does this drive feature the famous Sandforce controller, but also includes SanDisks very own asynchronous NAND flash memory, which is quite a big acomplishment in its own right.

An exciting time is upon us when we see a new set of memory chips come on the market, and we’re interested to see how they perform when we get down to it, but first we should have a look at what you get included when you buy this brand new product from SanDisk.

Giada, a sub brand of the Chinese company JEHE, has announced its latest compact Mini-ITX in Europe, the MI-Z68.

As you’ve probably guessed, this board is based on the Z68 Intel chipset and supports Core i3/i5/i7 but this Mini-ITX motherboard has no TDP restriction thanks to it full-fledged CPU VRM, which draws power from a 4-pin 12V connector apart from a 20-pin ATX connector, which any modern PSU will support. The board uses a 4+1 phase CPU VRM with a single phase memory.

For the memory, you’ll find two DDR3 DIMM slots, supporting dual-channel memory, while expansions is achieved through a PCI-Express 2.0 x16 so that, if used for an HTPC, you can fit it with a good VGA card to have even better graphics.

Connectivity wise, you won’t be missing much, the storage includes mSATA 3Gb/s, two SATA 6Gb/s (blue) and two SATA 3Gb/s while the rest includes two USB 3.0 (driven by a Renesas-made controller) on the rear I/O along four USB 2.0, one PS/2 keyboard port , Gigabit Ethernet (Realyek PHY driver) and 8-channel HD audio with optical SPDIF output. Display outputs for the integrated graphics include DVI and HDMI.

One of the things to note is the holes on the rear I/O over the four USB 2.0, most probably placed to give the possibility of installing a wireless mSATA card allowing more expandability and a wire-free internet.

The Giada MI-Z68 provides a lot more than what you’d expect from a Mini-ITX, all of which at a price of €88.

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StarTech.com has recently announced their latest product; the USB 3.0/eSATA to SATA Standalone 1:3 Hard Drive Duplicator Dock.

Basically, this duplicator dock will allow you to make three duplications sector-by-sector from a single SATA hard drive simultaneously without having to be connect to a computer.

Moreover the Duplicator Dock also comes with a SATA to IDE adapter and provides the option to connect one IDE hard drive into a SATA slot.

“IT professionals are always looking for ways to make their jobs more efficient and this new multi-drive duplicator allows them to accomplish just that,” commented StarTech.com Senior Product Manager, Carey Cline. “The ability to perform a sector by sector duplication on up to three drives simultaneously, frees up the user’s time to perform other functions while the back-ups are created in the background. The fact it acts as a standalone unit also means it doesn’t use up resources on their computer system.”

When connected to a computer, the Duplicator Dock also doubles as an external 4-bay docking station that you can connect either through the USB 3.0 or eSATA.

Other features are:

• Up to 72 MBps data transfer rates between drives, when used for hard drive duplication
• Up to 5Gbps or 3Gbps data transfer rates (connected through USB 3.0 or eSATA, respectively), when utilized as an external drive docking station
• Secure Erase feature simplifies erasing/wiping drive contents for further cloning use or disposal of a hard drive
• Dual 60mm cooling fans mounted beneath the drives help to keep docked hard drives at optimal operating temperatures
• Supports 2.5” or 3.5” form factor hard drives (HDDs) or Solid State Drives (SSDs)
• Integrated LCD displays duplication progress and duplicator options menu

The USB 3.0/eSATA to SATA Standalone 1:3 Hard Drive Duplicator Dock is now available for purchase from major retailers and e-tailers as well as the StarTech web-shop for a retail suggested price of £453.99.

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The style is rather simple, and most of today’s external SATA port look alike, but this QuickPort presents various features rather uncommon as of today, which is the USB3.0 capability and the additional three-port USB3.0 hub.

The QuickPort accept both 2.5” and 3.5” hard drive formats, the front features three USB3.0 ports as well as a LED that acts both as a power and activity light. On the backside you will find a power input, a USB3.0 output and separate power button. The QuickPort measures 133 (W) x 71 (H) x 95 (L) mm and weighs 520g. Included with the product is an instruction manual, power supply, power and USB3.0 cable.

The SATA QuickPort H3 USB3.0 is already available at authorized retailers for a retail price of €49.99.

For more information please go to Sharkon’s official website.

Whilst these enclosures and caddies are like all other things made by a number of different manufacturers in all varying applications, Icy Dock is one of those few that when you hear their name, you automatically know what they produce. Because of this, they have built up a rapport for building drive enclosures that are easy to use and have a great feel of quality to them.

Sample production of the 512GB drive began in May whereas volume production began earlier this month. The 512GB SSD utilizes Samsung’s most advanced 20 nanometer (nm) class 32Gigabit multi-level cell (MLC) NAND memory chip incorporating the toggle DDR interface. A proprietary NAND controller facilitates exceptional performance levels that take full advantage of the toggle DDR architecture and the SATA 6Gb/s interface. The new SSD doubles the performance of a SATA 3Gb/s drive, with sequential read speeds of 500 (MB/s) and sequential write speeds of 350MB/s.

Samsung’s PM830 SSDs are available in capacities of 512GB, 256GB and 128GB. Premium OEM notebook and tablet users are the targets for these new super fast SSDs.

SSD’s are already starting to push the limits of the existing SATA III 6Gb/s and so this new SATA Express will allow the continuation of development of yet even faster drives. The specification will define new device and motherboard connectors so that both SATA devices and the new SATA Express devices can be supported.

“The SATA Express specification provides SSD and hybrid drive manufacturers the advantages of performance and scalability enabled by PCIe 3.0 – which is available now – and the ubiquity of SATA,” said Mladen Luksic, SATA-IO president. “We expect the SATA Express specification to be completed by the end of 2011.”

Hopefully we have more details for you very soon.

The Pro II series AS203 SSD drives will be available in 32,64, 128 and 256 GB models all three utilising the SATA 3GB/s interface and all three also come with 128MB of cache. They use pretty standard MLC NAND Flash memory chips and support the TRIM command ( which essentially allows the operating system to clean up “waste” files that are no longer needed). The Mean Time Before Failure (MTBF) is 1 million hours so expect good product life.

The maximum write and read speeds vary between the; 32GB model 200Mb/s Write and 100Mb/s read. The 64GB model which has 250Mb/s write and 180Mb/s read whilst the 128/256GB models have 250Mb/s read and 230Mb/s write. All sizes of SSD in the Pro II series come with a 2 year manufacturer warranty and have an optional “Optimisation Kit” which has Acronis true image back up software, a 3.5″ to 2.5″ converter and a SATA to USB adapter.

Pricing has not been announced officially yet but expect prices to be much lower than the popular branded SATA 3GB/s devices. £50/$80 for the 32GB, £65/$100 for the 64GB, £110/$180 for the 128GB and £240/$400 seem like reasonable price estimates for the kind of price point Apacer will be aiming for.

To those not familiar with SAS it stands for ‘Serial Attached SCSI’ and is the upgrade from the old parallel SCSI that was first around in the 1980s. SAS does offer backwards-compatibility with second-generation SATA drives, for instance, SATA 3 Gbit/s drives may be connected to a SAS backplane, but not the other way round.

The SD01 can enable data transfer with maximum compatibility and stability, making it a great choice for not only taking important data on the go, but also a convenient and reliable home/office storage device.

Special Features:

• Unique stackable design for easy upgrades and expansion.
• Support SATA and SAS interface hard drive.
• Maximum 6Gbits data transfer speed via SATA or SAS dual-lane interface.
• Plug and Play & Hot-swappable connection.(system with AHCI mode)
• The power source synchronizes with computer.

Specifications:

The MX-DS Fusion Series takes advantage of the higher speed SATA interface offering unparalleled level of performance. It supports DuraClass and DuraWrite technologies, which improve endurance, performance and keep the power consumption low, while optimising the way in which data is written to the flash memory over conventional controllers. Of course they are also backward compatible with SATA I and SATA II.

The MX-MD FUSION drive delivers read-write speeds of up to 540/510 MB/s with a maximum of 80,000 IOPS. Other key features include the low power consumption (stand-by 1.6W and active up to 2.8W) and superiod durability (2 million MTBF). The DS FUSION series will be available in 60GB and 120GB versios backed with 2 Year Warranty and after course after-sales service.