LSI Corporation announced the availability of a Mac OS X driver for its 3ware 9690SA and 9650SE series RAID controller cards. The controllers enable Intel-based Mac server users in direct-attached storage environments to optimize read/write performance, enhance data protection and improve scalability to meet the demands of streaming media applications such as digital video, digital audio, film, broadcast and video-on-demand solutions.


                           LSI 3ware 9690SA

The LSI 3ware 9690SA and 9650SE controllers provide internal and external connectivity for systems using either SATA or SAS hard drives and are available in a variety of port configurations, including a full line of SATA controllers and low-profile SATA+SAS controllers. The 3ware RAID management interface and software suite provide users with intuitive configuration and management tools for enhanced ease of use.

"Video and digital entertainment production has a tremendous need for high-performance storage that protects the valuable data generated by creative professionals," said Brent Blanchard, director of Worldwide Channel Sales and Marketing, LSI. "As the world's leading supplier of host bus RAID solutions, we are providing the Mac user community with a proven RAID solution backed by our extensive experience and deep hardware, firmware and validation competencies."

Utilizing the Advanced Content Streaming feature included in the new 3ware firmware, StreamFusion +, the controllers optimize reads and writes in multi-stream environments by dividing total bandwidth equally among the various streams. This allows the controller to simultaneously sustain multiple streams without creating performance bottlenecks, even as data loads increase.

The controllers also boost the speed of streamed data writes, such as video capture and disk-to-disk backup, through improved caching algorithms. The caching technology is designed to result in up to a 50 percent performance improvement, equally balanced among all data streams while minimizing latencies.

The Intelligent Read Prefetch feature in StreamFusion + adds a new read-ahead caching method which enables data to be proactively retrieved from media and stored locally on the controller with the anticipation that it may be requested by the host. This helps to increase performance by loading larger sets of data into the cache, improving the chances that another request can be filled by data that is already there. The feature is ideally suited for applications that are sequential in nature, such as video and audio editing, video playback and recovery from backups.

LSI 3ware controllers are available through a worldwide network of distributors, integrators and VARs. New and existing customers may download the Mac OS X driver and StreamFusion + 9.5.2 firmware for free.