History 2005: Portable RAIDs

How do you distinguish the standard for a portable RAID: a handle, wheels, eventually a ruggedized enclosure? The concept of portable RAIDs is not entirely new, and until now, not that successful, expectations to the contrary notwithstanding.

Not enough RAID users that travel? The weight is certainly an obstacle, since a disk array worthy of the name would require at least 5 drives, not to mention the enclosure and controller.

Several years ago, VST tried to venture into this area. Recently, 2 related products were released by Think Computer Products and WiebeTech.

ThinkCP is offering a device, called the Fire-nice IceCube, at 9kg (without IDE HDDs from 200GB to 300GB) characterized by a huge handle on top for transporting it, simultaneously available from Allmedia Electronics and Excel Meridian Data . It includes 5 drives, with SCSI, USB or FireWire interfaces for prices ranging between $2,035 and $3,500.

MicroNet built, on a similar basis, its SANcube, for its preferred market, Apple, with a SAN subsystern that also integrates the Firewire interface and 5 drives, for a capacity of up to 4TB on IDE drives, and a price varying between $5,000 and $7,500 depending on capacities.

The portable RAID from another company with no shortage of new ideas, WiebeTech, is called Forensic Field Kit 7 (FFK-7), and is without a doubt the most ruggedized, with a rolling Pelikan case holding up to 2 field transportable RT5 RAIDs and space for a notebook PC.

The company intends it for a niche, but clever, market that of field investigators who go on site to  retrieve multiple terabytes from suspect computer systems. Each RT5 RAID, 10kg with the drives, has a capacity up to 2.5TB depending on the RAID level (0, 1,3 or 5) on 5 hot-swapped drives, with access through SATA, FireWire or USB protocols. The FFK-7, plug and play under Windows XP, 2K, Mac OS X, and Linux, costs $2,400 with one RT5 RAID, with the potential to add another within the same case for $1,700.

The same model can be found at Allmedia, Excel Meridian Data MicroNet or ThinkCP, with its characteristic handle on top.

This article is an abstract of news published on issue 208 on May 2005 from the former paper version of Computer Data  Storage Newsletter.