Bell Microproducts, Inc. subsidiary Rorke Data, Inc. has announced an improvement to the company’s line of high-speed disk storage arrays. Rorke said that its MaxArray product is now configured with Seagate’s 15,000 RPM Cheetah X15 drives. The company suggested that such systems are optimal for high-bandwidth applications like digital video.
Rorke’s MaxArray systems are configured in Fibre-Channel, Ultra160 and LVD disk storage arrays that range in transfer speed from 80 to 200MB/sec depending on the configuration. The systems range in capacity from 18GB to 400GB, and are configured in four-bay and eight-bay desktop towers as well as rack-mount designs. All utilize SCA backplane technology.
Rorke said that the MaxArray enclosures are designed to support the full range of Seagate’s recent drives, including the 73GB low-profile drive, the 36GB Cheetah X15, and the 180GB Barracuda hard drive.
Rorke Europe business development manager Quinton Maloney said that his company has seen an exponential increase in the number of applications that incorporate MaxArray. “We’ve seen a huge recent jump in the number of new digital video editing, DAWs, graphics and animation applications, and our constant adaptation to, and integration of, new technologies — including Fibre-Channel, Ultra160, and LVD, plus the new Cheetah drives — has kept MaxArray a leading product,” said Maloney.
Rorke bills Seagate’s Cheetah X15-36LP drive mechanism as “the world’s fastest disc drive.” It operates at 15,000 RPM and incorporates a 3.6 millisecond seek time, latency of 2 milliseconds, and up to 69 MB/sec formatted transfer rate. The drive is offered in Ultra160 SCSI, Ultra320 SCSI and 2 Gigabit Fibre Channel interfaces.