14 DAY TRIAL // Micro-Star International's GT70 gaming notebook might look like any other gaming portable PC at first glance, but a certain entry on the spec sheet makes it stand apart.
The MSI GT70 uses something called Super RAID, a storage technology that puts an interesting spin on solid state drive use in notebooks.
Gaming machines often have 2.5-inch SATA SSDs, or an HDD and an SSD, with or without SSD caching.
That way, they can achieve read and write speeds much higher than what a pure HDD setups manage.
With Super RAID, though, the company uses one hard disk drive and, in place of the second HDD, a Super RAID card that has two mSATA SSDs plugged into a small PCB.
The solid state drives in the photos are SanDisk-made, probably the U100 series.
With a capacity of 64 GB each, their individual performance isn't all that extraordinary, for NAND Flash anyway: 450 MB/s read and 220 MB/s write.
Fortunately, the individual performance isn't what we're interested in: MSI's Super RAID somehow reaches an average 928.6MB/s with a burst rate of 1,997.2MB/s in HD Tune Pro 5.00.
All this comes in half the space needed by a second HDD, so we can safely say that, even with the added cost, MSI is onto something here.
The rest of the laptop components are pretty much what people would expect from a 17.3-inch gaming beast, though we don't have all the specifics.
An Intel Ivy Bridge CPU (no, not one of the “broken” ones) is backed up by a lot of RAM (not certain how much) and an NVIDIA GeForce 600-series mobile GPU (graphics processing unit).
We'll have to wait until the official announcement for the rest (RAM, web connectivity, I/O, software, warranty, etc.). People should just keep in mind that Super RAID will probably add a bit more to the price than the common alternatives.
