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JULY 2011

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RAID controllers, and other peripherals to a computer with a Thun- derbolt port. “It also gives access to customers who have portable laptops now that are equipped with Thunderbolt,” Laporte explains.“These video capture cards [and] high-speed RAID storage, in a portable fashion where they couldn’t before... I think the best benefit of it is the flexi- bility and the portability. Our Echo expansion chassis is going to give you the ability to take on the road those types of expansion cards that you needed a desktop MacPro to accommodate previously.” All of the new Sonnet products include two Thunderbolt ports to support daisy chaining of up to six devices to a single Thunder- bolt port on the host computer. The Fusion F2TBR two-drive portable SSD storage system fea- tures 2.5-inch solid state drives mounted side-by-side in an aluminum shell.With its SSDs configured as a RAID 0 set, the F2TBR achieves data transfers up to 640MB/sec. read and 430MB/sec. write.This per- formance makes it suitable for video capture and editing on location. The Fusion E400TBR5 four-drive RAID 5 desktop storage sys- tem includes a high-performance internal RAID controller that supports RAID-5 for great performance and file protection in case Sonnet is also offering the Allegro FW800 Thunder- bolt adapter, which converts the Thunderbolt con- nector to a powered FireWire 800 port, and the Presto Gigabit Ethernet Thunder- bolt adapter, which converts a Thun- derbolt connector to a GigE port. PROMISE TECHNOLOGY At press time, Promise Technol- ogy in Milpitas, CA, was get- ting ready to launch two new direct-attached storage prod- ucts incorporating Thunderbolt. The Pegasus R4 and R6 will be among the first hardware RAID subsystem enclosures, notes product manager Billy Harrison.The four-bay and six-bay high- performance hardware RAID solutions are designed to unleash olt-enabled of a single drive failure.The unit can also be configured for RAID-0 for maximum performance, and JBOD for flexibility.Available in 4, 6, 8, or 12TB configurations, the Fusion E400TBR5 in RAID-5 achieves data transfers of up to 400MB/sec. read and 340MB/sec. write.This is nearly twice as fast as similar four-drive storage sys- tems using an eSATA interface. The Fusion D800TBR5 eight-drive RAID-5 desktop storage system includes a high-perfor- mance internal RAID controller that supports RAID-0, 1, 5 and JBOD. It’s available in 8, 12, 16, or 24TB configurations, and is well suited for HD video editing. Data transfers of up to 800MB/sec. read and 730MB/sec. write make it fast enough to handle a single stream of un- compressed 10-bit 1080 4:4:4 HD, or multiple streams of ProRes 422, uncompressed 8-bit 1080 HD,DV,HDV, and DVCPRO video. Sonnet products include two Thunderbolt ports. Thunderbolt-enabled products require an Intel controller chip. This new technology promises to open up bottlenecks between systems and storage. By Marc Loftus Thunderbolt’s ability to deliver two channels of 10Gb/s performance. According to Harrison, the R4 and R6 use SATA drives to deliver approximately 860MB/sec. read, and 780MB/sec. write performance. The solutions support RAID-0, 1, 5, 6 and 10 configurations, and offer 4TB and 6TB of raw capacity. “They will ship with SATA drives, and users can also use SAS dri- ves or SSDs if they choose,” says Harrison. “If you are using SSDs, you can pretty much saturate the buss.” Promise is working with Apple to make the Pegasus products available through its online store. In late June, according to Harrison, they were “probably a few weeks out.We are getting there, but Apple is making some software enhancements to Thunderbolt on the Mac as well.There is going to be an update coming soon and that’s the same time that we release our product.” Harrison sees several advantages to incorporating Thunderbolt technology into Promise’s product line. “There are definitely per- formance [advantages],” he notes. “The fact that Thunderbolt ports are dual channel is pretty impressive as well, because with dual channel, you can run multiple I/O to multiple devices sitting on the same buss. “The display port, as well, is very nice,” he continues. “It allows you to add a large display, especially to laptops, where you typically have a small screen.You can have a large screen and storage device for those that are into editing, whether it be audio, video or photog- raphy.And the dual-ported architecture is very cool because you www.postmagazine.com July 2011 • Post 25

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