Charismac Engineering is combining their Mac and Windows 2000 RAID software packages on one CD even as they reduce the retail cost for the all-in-one package.
The Mac version of the RAID software previously retailed for US$199.95. The hybrid CD packs 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 (sorry, not Mac OS X yet) or Windows 2000 (Professional and Server) operating systems.
Striping is a way to increase performance by dividing the data being written to multiple drives and writing it simultaneously to the disks. In certain configurations, you may see up to a 300 percent performance increase when taking advantage of striping, according to the folks at Charismac.
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 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). Charismac RAID Plus features native FireWire support for striping; mirroring is promised soon.
It fully supports HFS+ and the Extended Format capabilities and Apple’s SCSI Manager 4.3. You can stripe, mirror or span both fixed disk and removable drives, including Optical, SyQuest, Zip and Jaz drives. The Charismac RAID supports multiple SCSI buses and LUNs for control of over 100 devices on one SCSI bus. You can stripe drives across buses of dual bus Macs, or across any third-party FireWire, SCSI, NuBus, PCI or SSA acceleration card.
An “intelligent” driver seeks drives in an array and mounts without adding any components to your System folder when used with SCSI or Fibre Channel disks. Charismac RAID also allows spanning of multiple disks to create one volume.
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