VST Technology has officially announced the FireWire Raid solution first whown off by Steve Jobs during the MACWORLD Expo San Francisco keynote address. Calling it the VST FireRAID, the new hardware should be available in April of this year. The VST FireRAID ofers Raid 0 (Striping) and RAID 1 (mirroring). According to VST:
VST has officially announced a 100 GB FireWire Raid Array called the VST FireRAID. This is the same array that was shown at MACWORLD Expo San Francisco by Steve Jobs during his keynote address. The company is demonstrating it at MACWORLD Tokyo. The device uses hot swappable FireWire drives providing either Raid 0 or Raid 1. While aimed somewhat at the Mac market, VST says that the VST FireRAID is also compatible with Windows 98 and Windows 2000. According to VST:
VST Technologies, Inc. a leading FireWire(tm) and USB developer, today announced a 100GB FireWire based RAID Array designed to work with all FireWire equipped Macintosh computers from Apple(tm) Computer, Inc. The Company plans to demonstrate their 100GB portable RAID Array at MacWorld EXPO in Tokyo February 16th at VST booth # 418. The product may also be seen in Apple Computer's booth.
The VST FireRAID Array includes custom hardware and software that allow multiple FireWire Hard Drives to be used together as a high performance RAID array by providing striping, mirroring and HFS volumes, all simultaneously. Like the VST FireWire Hard Drives, the smallest and most compact in the world, FireRAID is designed to be very small and compact . Measuring approximately 5in Wide x 7in Depth and 9in High, FireRAID is actually portable, and includes built-in Li-Ion battery backup capable of running the array for up to 2 hours in the event of loss of AC power.
Used as an array, multiple drives provide significantly increased bandwidth in the form of Striping (RAID level 0). Striping is a method of streaming data to/from multiple drives simultaneously to achieve higher bandwidth. FireRAID also provides mirroring. Mirroring (RAID level 1) provides an identical, redundant copy of the volumes data on two drives in the array, so that a single drive failure will not result in loss of important data. In addition, FireRAID allows standard HFS volumes to be created. FireRAID has been designed to allow booting from HFS as well as mirrored volumes with future Mac OS updates from Apple.
The VST FireRAID Array towers may be connected together to form larger arrays (up to 16 drives are supported). Data throughput is expected to range from 30 to 40MB/Sec RD (Mega Bytes per Second), 20 to 30MB/Sec WR, depending on the particular mechanisms used.
FireWire Standard FireWire is integrated into every Power Macintosh G4, iMac DV and new PowerBook® Series products introduced today at MacWorld Tokyo. FireWire, a technology invented by Apple, is a high-speed serial interface and was adopted by the IEEE as a standard (IEEE 1394) in 1995. FireWire is revolutionizing desktop and portable digital video by allowing broadcast-quality video authoring at low consumer price points. It's fast, supporting transfer speeds to 400Mbps. It's scalable, supporting up to 63 devices. It's hot-pluggable, so users may unplug/re-plug devices on the fly without the need to shutdown, or restart their computers. VST offers portable and desktop hard drives, Zip Drives in 100MB and 250MB capacities, PC Cards for mobile users and RAID arrays all in FireWire solutions.
In addition to cross-platform compatibility with Microsoft Windows 98 SE and Windows 2000, the FireWire standard is being chosen for an ever-increasing array of consumer and internet multimedia devices like set-top boxes, digital VCRs, DVD-ROM, DVD-RAM, CD-R, CD-RW, DAT and dozens of digital camcorders and professional still image cameras - all equipped with FireWire built-in.
Pricing and Availability
- Product: FireWire RAID Tower Model: FWRAIDTWR Pricing: $1,099 Availability: April 2000
- Product: FireRAID 24GB Array Model: FWRAID24 Pricing: $2,199 Availability: April 2000
- Product: FireRAID 48GB Array Model: FWRAID48 Pricing: $3,499 Availability: April 2000
- Product: FireRAID 72GB Array Model: FWRAID72 Pricing: $4,299 Availability: April 2000
- Product: FireRAID 100GB Array Model: FWRAID100 Pricing: $5,299 Availability: April 2000
All products include FireRAID software, Li-Ion Battery, AC Power Adapter.
Note: Each array includes four (4) FW drives as follows: FWRAID24 - 4 - 6GB VST FireWire Drives FWRAID48 - 4 - 12GB VST FireWire Drives FWRAID72 - 4 - 18GB VST FireWire Drives FWRAID100 - 4 - 25GB VST FireWire Drives
Custom build-to-order configurations are available
