Anyone that knows me knows that I like to use Macintosh products wherever possible, including in the Storage Switzerland labs. So while we have plenty of Windows servers, I try to do as much work as I can from my Macs. One of the challenges has been the lack of ability to test high performance solid state storage. To address this shortcoming we recently added the Other World Computing (OWC) Helios to our lab and it has been a valuable addition to our lab work.
The Helios is a PCIe Thunderbolt Expansion Chassis giving your iMac or MacBookPro access to dozens of PCIe Adaptors. In the video below you will see how quickly we were able to get the unit up and running and see our test of OWC’s Mercury Accelsior PCIe SSD.
Storage Swiss Take
One of my complaints about Apple of late is the lack of flexibility in Mac configurations. OWC’s Helios addresses that problem and makes the lack of the desktop MacPro less of an issue. Now even the new thin but sealed iMac can handle customized configurations with ease. My only complaint is a noticeable level of fan noise from the unit. In a busy office situation it is barely noticeable but under quite conditions it could be an issue.
Other than that one small point the Helios is near perfect for our needs, providing bootable access to a wide variety of PCIe storage and PCIe networking cards. In our next video we will show using the Helios and Sonnet Technologies Tempo SATA Pro 4 Port 6Gb/s eSATA PCIe Host Adapter to test our latest SSD drive from Samsung.
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George Crump is the Chief Marketing Officer at VergeIO, the leader in Ultraconverged Infrastructure. Prior to VergeIO he was Chief Product Strategist at StorONE. Before assuming roles with innovative technology vendors, George spent almost 14 years as the founder and lead analyst at Storage Switzerland. In his spare time, he continues to write blogs on Storage Switzerland to educate IT professionals on all aspects of data center storage. He is the primary contributor to Storage Switzerland and is a heavily sought-after public speaker. With over 30 years of experience designing storage solutions for data centers across the US, he has seen the birth of such technologies as RAID, NAS, SAN, Virtualization, Cloud, and Enterprise Flash. Before founding Storage Switzerland, he was CTO at one of the nation's largest storage integrators, where he was in charge of technology testing, integration, and product selection.
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