Sans Digital: MobileSTOR MS8X6

Sans Digital announce a new addition to the MobileSTOR series. The MS8X6 is an eight-bay SAS/SATA JBOD SAS expander tower with expansion capability.

Based on the EliteSTOR SAS expander series, the MobileSTOR MS8X6 connects to 6G SAS or SATA hard drives via one mini-SAS (SFF-8088) cable to the host bus adapter. The MS8X6 provides over 800MB/s of data transfer when directly connected to a RAID controller and could be daisy-chained up to 3 additional units, allowing pay as you grow model for storage hungry applications.

The MS8X6 supports both 3G and 6G SATA or SAS hard drives and includes an array of standard features such as dual SAS channel, dual expansion mini-SAS slot (up to 4 units total), and SGPIO support that enables the HBA controller to access real-time information regarding the MS8X6 and each of the hard drives installed in the unit. The MS8X6 provides up to 24TB of raw data capacity when 3TB hard drives are utilized and allows up to two hard drive failures without data loss when RAID 6 is implemented.

The 6G SAS technology was developed to address the demand for data transfer speed to cope with the new IO performance requirement needed for information technology and video editing applications. 3Gbps performance of the SAS expander is currently limited to 1,200MB/s in bandwidth and typically generates about 700MB/s in RAID 6 environment. The introduction of 6Gbps RAID controller cards, such as LSI 9280 and Areca ARC-1880X, doubles the bandwidth and triples the performance to 2,400MB/s and 1,700MB/s in read (1,500MB/s in write). At the same time, MS8X6 is backward compatible to 3Gbps RAID controllers, allowing deployment and future upgrades to 6G solutions.

"6G storage is the latest innovation of the storage technology that instantly improves storage performance," said Stanley Chan, Director of Business Development of Sans Digital. "The MS8X6 proves itself as the most viable choice between value and performance with the 6G performance."