Storage product maker LaCie is shipping its new high-speed RAID system, the TX12000, for Mac environments. Touted as a “complete turnkey solution,” the system is specifically designed for applications where fault-tolerance, high data throughput, extensibility and economy are prime requirements, LaCie spokesperson Andy Marken said.
The TX12000 can be attached to just about any SCSI host computer without special device drivers or software. Configure it with LaCie’s new 7200 rpm 180GB hard drives, and the RAID system can achieve transfer rates of up to 75 MB per second and a 2ms average access time, according to LaCie. With support for up to 12 drives, the TX12000 provides a total capacity of up to 2.16TB using the 180GB drives.
The TX12000 can be configured as a single JBOD with three drives and scale to 2 x 12 hard disks by daisy chaining two TX12000s in a RAID system. Its U160 interface offers backward compatibility with legacy SCSI drives or hosts. Plus, the TX12000 can be attached to your existing server via any single-ended or Ultra 160 SCSI controller.
LaCie’s controller supports up to eight concurrent RAID sets, each with its own unique RAID level, allowing custom configuration. For desktop video, editing and transferring giant Adobe PhotoShop files, or searching massive databases requiring high- speed processing, the RAID 0 configuration can be used. Other RAID configurations (1, 0+1, 3 and 5) offer fault-tolerant data redundancy — the ability to recover data that would otherwise be lost by a failed drive. The array automatically rebuilds the data from the failed drive on a spare drive, without any system downtime, Marken said.
The array can be set up and administered via an LCD display at the back of the device. Once installed, a movable LCD panel at the front of the device can be used to view the drives’ status. The system can be designed as a tower or several towers can be stacked in a compact Rack mount configuration.
The LaCie TX12000 towers come with standard 160MB/sec SCSI host connectivity, dual ingress power architecture and 12 hot-pluggable disk drive modules that can accommodate 10,000 rpm hard drives with capacities of 36 GB, 73 GB or 7200 rpm 180 GB hard drive. It’s available in tower or rack configurations.
For security purposes, the TX12000’s disk modules are equipped with individual locks to protect the unit against theft or removal of disk modules and other everyday risks. For more info, go to the LaCie Web site.