Early Benchmarks and Teardown of LaCie Little Big Disk

LaCie released its first Thunderbolt-equipped storage solution called Little Big Disk (LBD) last week, and some people have already received their units. A user ender21 over at MacRumors Forums has posted some early benchmarks and a small teardown of the 1TB version of LBD. The 1TB unit comes with two 500GB 7200rpm drives configured in RAID 0, so the SSDs are user-installed. LaCie also has plans for SSD based LBD but the availability is unknown at the moment.

Benchmarks

For this test, a 6.22GB QuickTime video file was used. The file was moved from OWC Extreme 6G 120GB to the LBD, and back, to test average transfer speeds. The SSD configuration was also tested with a RAM disk to eliminate possible bottlenecks caused by the internal SSD. 

What is surprising is that the SSDs in RAID 0 deliver so poor performance. We are looking at only 20-30MB/s increase (40-50MB/s with RAM disk) in performance over two 7200rpm HDs in RAID 0, while even a single Crucial M4 should deliver speeds of over 500MB/s with incompressible data, such as a video file like in this test. It's possible that the SATA controller in LBD is SATA 3Gb/s, since at least the hard drives are 3Gb/s variety (not that they could take advantage of SATA 6Gb/s anyway). Even that wouldn't explain the poor performance though, because Crucial m4 gets speeds of around 270MB/s when connected to SATA 3Gb/s, so we should be looking at figures around 500MB/s when running RAID 0 with two drives. Thunderbolt can't be the limiting factor due to its maximum transfer rate of 1.25GB/s. 

Hopefully we will find out what is causing the low transfer speeds when we get our review unit, or if there is simply an error in these figures. 

Teardown

Gallery: LaCie Little Big Disk Teardown

The teardown doesn't reveal anything special. There are two 2.5" 7200rpm drives inside the chassis. This is a 1TB model with two 500GB hard drives, which turned out to be made by Hitachi, but it's possible that other brands are used as well. Upgrading the hard drives doesn't look too hard and there aren't many screws on the way either. 

The circuit board is shown in one of the pictures but there isn't anything surprising. The actual Thunderbolt chips seems to be covered by something, so we don't see its model number either. 

Thanks to Rick for providing us the benchmarks and pictures!

Source: MacRumors Forums

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Hands on and Benchmarks of two MSM8x60 Phones - HTC Sensation 4G and HTC EVO 3D

Yesterday evening I met up with HTC, who let me take a quick look at a number of upcoming unreleased phones, including the HTC Sensation 4G and HTC EVO 3D. Naturally, the first thing I did was sit down and run some benchmarks during our limited time with the phones, and get an overall feel for the two. These two phones are both based on Qualcomm's MSM8x60 SoC which consists of two 1.2 GHz scorpion cores, and Adreno 220 graphics. We also spent a little bit of time with the HTC ChaCha and HTC Salsa.

Read on for some benchmark goodness and our thoughts about these four devices. 

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Hands on and Benchmarks of two MSM8x60 Phones - HTC Sensation 4G and HTC EVO 3D

Yesterday evening I met up with HTC, who let me take a quick look at a number of upcoming unreleased phones, including the HTC Sensation 4G and HTC EVO 3D. Naturally, the first thing I did was sit down and run some benchmarks during our limited time with the phones, and get an overall feel for the two. These two phones are both based on Qualcomm's MSM8x60 SoC which consists of two 1.2 GHz scorpion cores, and Adreno 220 graphics. We also spent a little bit of time with the HTC ChaCha and HTC Salsa.

Read on for some benchmark goodness and our thoughts about these four devices. 

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CES 2011: Corsair Performance Series 3 SSD Benchmarks

Corsair has traditionally been a very conservative player in the SSD space. It started by selling Samsung based drives and eventually moved to Indilinx (although far later than its chief competitors). With SandForce Corsair narrowed the time to market gap, but it was still late. Not this time however.

As Dustin mentioned in his CES coverage, Corsair has a new drive that it announced at the show: the Performance Series 3 SSD. Based on the same Marvell controller as Micron’s C300/C400 but with what Corsair tells us is a different firmware, the P3 is supposed to be very quick.

Corsair had a pair of the 6Gbps drives on display at CES running on a Sandy Bridge platform. In RAID-0, the two 128GB P3 drives posted some impressive scores:

Peaking at 878MB/s reads and 430MB/s writes, assuming linear scaling that would put the speed of a single P3-128 drive at 439MB/s and 215MB/s for sequential reads and writes, respectively. Real world performance obviously depends on much more than just raw sequential read/write speed, but this is a good start.

The next wave of high end consumer SSDs will begin shipping this month, and I believe Corsair may be the first out the gate. Micron will follow shortly with its C400 and then we’ll likely see a third generation offering from Intel before eventually getting final hardware based on SandForce’s SF-2000 controllers in May.

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