ADS Technologies Inc. today announced the release of the PYRO DV RAID system. It’s a dual-bay drive enclosure designed for FireWire-based Mac OS or Windows PCs. It’s a do-it-yourself kit — users are responsible for providing their own drives into the PYRO DV RAID.
The system is designed to fit two Ultra ATA-100 or 66 hard drives and includes Charismac RAID Plus software, which supports either RAID level 0 (striping) or RAID level 1 (mirroring). It’s supported on Mac OS 9.x or Windows 2000. This isn’t the first kit the company has released, either — they also make a 1394 Drive Kit that enables users to install their own IDE hard drives or optical drives into an external enclosure for FireWire connectivity.
Because it uses FireWire, ADS claims the system can be set up in minutes. Drives are removable too, so they can be shuttled back and forth between workstations.
ADS president Mike McCoy said that his company is responding to increasing demand by professionals looking for large file storage. “With PYRO DV RAID, users have maximum flexibility in customization because they install their choice of drives. With our hardware and software-based RAID, this will not only increase storage space, but also boost data transfer and performance for applications such as digital video editing,” said McCoy.
System requirements call for a Mac running Mac OS 9.x, 32MB RAM, 1MB available hard disk space, available FireWire port and two (2) IDE hard drives to be installed in the enclosure. ADS says the system is available through retailers worldwide. It carries an estimated street price of US$399.