Up to 10X throughput improvement

Apricorn today debuted its SSD-based Mac Array, a turnkey virtual memory expansion kit that uses a single PCIe X4 slot and a total of 512GB of SATA SSD drives to dramatically outscore traditional 7200rpm SATA disk drives, and even more remarkable increases in video or graphic rendering times. The array takes moments to install and is preconfigured for Mac and RAID 0 (striping), including a custom SATA PCIe host card on board.

Testing by Apricorn revealed that a single Mac Array, which uses four 128GB Western Digital SiliconEdge Blue drives, boosted read rates by 10 times and write speeds by 6.8 times over SATA hard disks, and when two or more Mac Arrays were used, speeds increased to 18 times read and 13.5 times write over disk-based drives. The Mac Array is aimed at video and graphics professionals, and boasts of 80 percent reductions in HD video rendering when used with Final Cut Pro. Using the array as an Adobe Photoshop scratch disk speeded image processing up to 360 percent.

The Mac Array requires Mac OS X 10.5. or 10.6 and works seamlessly with all high-end professional software. The array with a combined 512GB capacity sells for $1500.

By Electronista Staff