Review: Apricorn's PCIe Drive Arrays

Apricorn's PCIe Drive Arrays: Easy installation, 'write cliff' performance hit

Company: Apricorn
Product: PCIe Drive Arrays

Apricorn sent us two of their boards, which consist of a 4x PCIe RAID controller with four mounts for 2.5 inch SATA drives. The drives can be either hard drives or SSDs.

One of the boards had four 64GB consumer-grade MLC-based SSDs, two Samsung and two PQI drives. The other board had four 80GB Intel SSDSA2MH080G1GN 3Gbps SLC-based 2.5 inch SATA drives. The Intel drives, while more expensive, offered much higher performance and were much less affected by the "write cliff" effect. Installing the boards was very straightforward, with just a driver to be installed after the board was installed. The board can be purchased separately for $199, which means that you don't have to buy marked-up drives from Apricorn – you can shop for the best deal. Since the drives are mounted directly on the controller, you don't need to find power connectors for the drives as you do with the Adaptec.

To continue reading, register here and become an Insider. You'll get free access to premium content from CIO, Computerworld, CSO, InfoWorld, and Network World. See more Insider content or sign in.

Company: Apricorn
Product: PCIe Drive Arrays

Apricorn sent us two of their boards, which consist of a 4x PCIe RAID controller with four mounts for 2.5 inch SATA drives. The drives can be either hard drives or SSDs.

One of the boards had four 64GB consumer-grade MLC-based SSDs, two Samsung and two PQI drives. The other board had four 80GB Intel SSDSA2MH080G1GN 3Gbps SLC-based 2.5 inch SATA drives. The Intel drives, while more expensive, offered much higher performance and were much less affected by the "write cliff" effect. Installing the boards was very straightforward, with just a driver to be installed after the board was installed. The board can be purchased separately for $199, which means that you don't have to buy marked-up drives from Apricorn – you can shop for the best deal. Since the drives are mounted directly on the controller, you don't need to find power connectors for the drives as you do with the Adaptec.

Return to main test.

Read more about data center in Network World's Data Center section.