by Peter Cohen, MacCentral  

Medea Corp. has announced Macintosh support for its VideoRaid RTR320 / RTR320X SCSI and FCR2 / FCR2X Fibre Channel RAID arrays. The RAID arrays use PCI Express to communicate with the host computer; PCI Express is featured on Apple’s recently updated Power Mac G5 systems.

Specifically, Medea uses Atto Technology’s Ultra320 UL5D PCI Express SCSI host adapter and Atto’s Celerity FC-42ES and FC-44ES adapters for the Fibre Channel systems. The companies hope the solutions will appeal to Mac-using shops looking for fast storage solutions for high-definition video, rich content databases and other high-bandwidth environments.

The FCR2 is equipped with a single-channel 2Gb Fibre Channel interface and is capable of 180MB/s sustained transfer rates. the FCR2X features dual channels and up to 320 MB/s sustained transfer — enough to accommodate HD editing.

The SCSI solutions have been developed to appeal to pros in the post production and content creation markets; they’re rack-mounted disk arrays that feature either single or dual-channel Ultra320 SCSI interfaces, and can be configured with 5 or 10 Serial ATA (SATA) disk drives, with capabilities up to 4 terabytes (TB). Both the RTR320 and RTR320X are equipped with Medea’s Multi-Stream Technology (MST), which the company says can support simultaneous real-time playback of multiple streams of Standard Definition (SD) and High Definition (HD) video. Combined transfer speeds of up to 640MB/s are possible using these systems.

The solutions are on display at this week’s NAB Post show in New York City.