STB Suite

Testing New Technologies

Introduction

Our company, SCSI Toolbox LLC, has been in the computer peripheral testing business for 21 years. Our first product tested SCSI disk and tape drives. SCSI 1. Five MB/second maximum possible I/O rate.

We provided a “dongle” which plugged into your DOS computers parallel printer port – remember those? This dongle had a 25-pin SCSI I connector for attaching it to SCSI devices.

The race was on.

Time Marches on…

Then came SCSI 2. Then Wide SCSI. Faster and wider, from 5MB/s to 10, 20, 40, 80, 160, and finally (if you held your mouth just right) 320 MB/s, 16-bit wide parallel SCSI.

By this time the printer-port adapters had gone away, to be replaced by in-system Host Bus Adapters.

Then a new technology leap came along – Fibre Channel.

As time moved on, so did storage technologies, and so did the SCSI Toolbox. SCSI, SAS, IDE, ATA, SATA, FC, FireWire, USB and so on. As new storage interface and protocols have arrived we have kept up so our product will always work with the newest, latest, greatest.

A while back we stopped to referring to “The SCSI Toolbox” and started referring to “STB” – “The Storage Toolbox”.

Performa

Our Performa plan has provided an easy upgrade path over the years, and our product has continued to be updated and improved and to support the latest storage interfaces as they come along.

Today

What’s new as far as storage technology today? Certainly Fibre Channel, SAS, and SATA are progressing into higher and higher bandwidth and speeds. SSD drives are now common, and have their own particularities which must be taken into account in a testing environment.

And the newest interface technologies starting to appear are PCIe and NVMe interfaces. Typically these interfaces are used with SSD rather than rotating disk technology.

And the STB Suite can drive them to the max!

 

Here’s a screenshot showing the transfer rate (sequential read test) of an NVMe “drive”

 

And a DMM log file showing the same type of test-

 

And another STB Suite function –

Summary – the Good News

The good news is yes, the STB Suite will test PCIe and NVMe storage devices just fine! And as other, newer storage technologies come down the road the STB Suite will be there to test, exercise, and explore them as well!

How much does it cost to update your STB Suite as new technologies come along? Just the price of the Performa plan – what a deal!