Charismac Engineering, Inc. today combined their Macintosh and Windows 2000 RAID software packages on one CD while reducing the retail cost for the all-in-one package. The Macintosh version of the popular RAID software previously retailed for $199.95, the hybrid CD now boasts a suggested retail price of $99.95 and is available for a limited time for $59.95.
The RAID software supports RAID levels 0 (striping) and 1 (mirroring) using either Macintosh 9.x or Windows 2000 (Professional and Server) operating systems.
Striping is a way to significantly increase performance by dividing the data being written to multiple drives and writing it simultaneously to the disks. In certain configurations, users may see up to a 300% performance increase when taking advantage of striping.
Mirroring provides users with real-time backup. When two drives are mirrored, they appear as one drive to the computer. The same data is written to both drives simultaneously with no significant performance hit to the host system. If one drive fails, the user has immediate access to the second drive of the mirror providing an instant backup.
The Charismac RAID software packages both fully support firewire, SCSI and fibre channel disk drive interfaces. The Windows 2000 RAID product also supports internal IDE-based disk drives. Windows 2000 users have not been able to stripe or mirror firewire drives prior to this release.
The Charismac RAID software package is now available for US$99.95. You can find more information at the Charismac Engineering Web site.