Features - Storage Innovations:

RORKE DATA SELECTS HITACHI DESKSTAR SATA DRIVES FOR GALAXYI RAID

At the International Broadcaster's Consortium (IBC) 2004, Rorke Data, together with its sister company Bell Microproducts Europe BV, announced plans to integrate 400GB Hitachi Deskstar 7K400 SATA hard drives into Rorke Data's Galaxyi series of storage systems.

The Galaxy 16i series offers a choice of either high-performance Fibre Channel or SCSI-U320 controller technology and is engineered to meet a diverse range of user requirements such as fixed digital content storage, IT infrastructure efficiency, or rich media creation and distribution. Built to sustain high-level performance, the Galaxyi series is ideal for a broad range of applications including nearline digital content storage, video editing and special effects, broadcast server archiving and digital cinema applications.

"Rorke Data is excited to partner with Hitachi, a true technology innovator and hard drive performance leader," said Joe Rorke, vice president of marketing at Rorke Data. "Hitachi's 400GB SATA drives are the perfect complement to Rorke Data's data intensive storage products for the media and entertainment industry. When paired with Rorke's Galaxyi family, the Hitachi drives make it possible for us to offer the video and film post production community approved RAID and SAN solutions that not only provide fast access to files, but are very economically priced as well at under a .5 cents per megabyte."

The Deskstar 7K400 remains the industry's highest capacity 3.5-inch SATA hard drive. The new drives include several design features that combine to protect customer data and increase capacity, while maintaining Hitachi's award-winning performance. Among these new features is Rotational Vibration Safeguard (RVS) technology, which is used to ensure drive performance in multi-drive configurations. The drive is the fifth-generation Deskstar to utilize load/unload technology, which is designed to protect data stored on the disks during inactivity. Upon power down, the heads are automatically removed from the disk area and a locking mechanism secures the heads in the "unload" position.

The Galaxyi supports multiple array configuration (RAID levels 0, 1, 1[0+1], 3, 5, 10, 30, 50 and JBOD) as well as hot-spare drive operation and drive hot-swapping. The drive, which features a 8MB-buffer, offers an average seek time of 8.5 ms and enough capacity to store up to 45 hours of HDTV programming.