Winchester Systems RAIDs Support 2TB SAS HDDs

Winchester Systems Inc. announced that their FlashDisk SAS/SATA disk arrays now support the new larger capacity 2 TB SAS disk drives designed for high reliability access to bulk storage.

SAS disks now offer the same 2 TB capacity as SATA disks and provide extra reliability features such as dual ports for redundancy and error detection and correction algorithms. This creates a new intermediate tier of storage between high speed SAS and Fibre Channel disks with 15k rpm for primary, high performance applications and SATA bulk storage for backups and archiving. Many applications such as radiology images, security and surveillance videos, data acquisition, data mining and other applications where the data is voluminous and historical yet is still primary storage and not just a copy of the real data. These applications are good candidates for high capacity and high reliability of the 2 TB SAS drives at relatively low cost.

As tiered storage systems, these FlashDisk RAID disk arrays now effectively support three tiers of storage in a single solution. These tiers include primary storage using 15k rpm SAS disks, secondary storage using SATA 7.2k rpm disks and a new intermediate tier for high volume reference materials using the new SAS 7.2K rpm disks that need the reliability of SAS without the cost of high performance.

FlashDisk SX-2300 disk array models support up to 84 disks including the base unit and six expansion shelves, with 12 disks each, now offers 168 TB of SAS and SATA storage. Likewise, FlashDisk SX-3400 disk array models support 112 disks, with 16 disks per shelf, and now offer 224 TB of SAS and SATA storage.

According to the company’s chief executive officer, Mr. Joel Leider, "Many of our customers love the idea of using FlashDisk disk arrays with the capacity and reliability of 2 TB SAS disks – at low cost."

For added protection of today’s very large RAID disk arrays, the company includes ASIC-driven RAID 6 dual-parity that protects data in the event of two drive failures as well as rebuild failures. According to the company, RAID 6 dual parity offers 500 to 30,000 times longer MTDL (Mean Time To Data Loss) than RAID 5.

FlashDisk SX-2300 disk array models using 2 TB disks are available now and start from under $12,000. Delivery is 2-3 weeks ARO.