Continuing its diversification away from its floppy disk drive base, Tokyo-based Teac Corp is launching a mini-RAID system for personal computers. It is targetting the small office, small workgroup environment with the Teac-Stor TR-405, a five-drive RAID disk array that has a capacity of 2.1Gb and can be integrated into a tower. Teac says that with this product it is attempting to bring the possibility of RAID to the attention of corporate users. The company says it will emphasise the system’s failsafe qualities rather than its power levels. The TR-405 has RAID Level 3 and 5, with level 3 aimed at computer-aided design and manufacturing users amd the level 5 at local area networks. The other application is audio technology: working with its sister company that provides mixing desk equipment, the TR-405 can be used to record digital audio to disk. Teac also believes it will be of use in data logging in PABXes. Teac says that, as with large RAID systems, each of the five drives is hot-swappable. The system has an SCS interface, which means that users can actually boot from the TR-405 as if it were a single hard disk drive. The individual drives are held in 5.25 bays and despite the five drives, Teac says the assembly only dissipates 8.1W. When idle, the system merely cycles through the five drives checking everything is in order. When a drive has been swapped, Teac says the user can continue working on her application while the TR-405 automatically checks if the inserted drive is the correct type and rebuilds the data. Each drive has a modest capacity of 540Mb but Teac is planning larger capacity drives shortly. Teac says the system can either be attached to a network server, or if high capacity storage was needed, to individual personal computers to provide on-line storage. Up to seven devices can be linked in a daisy chain to provide capacities of up to 10.5Gb. Teac will sell the device as a complete kit with software that integrates it to a personal computer. Teac plans to make it operable with Macintoshes and Sparc-based systems. At the moment end users or network administrators can talk directly to the drive to check status and the error log, rather than going through the application. Otherwise the device appears as a single hard drive to the end users. However, this reassurance the company promises does not come cheap at #3,550 a go, making a daisy chain configuration anything but inexpensive. Teac believes that as that price is still considerably less than available RAID system, many smaller companies might find the TR-405 an attractive form of insurance. But as Teac sees the product as a total replacement for a business’s hard disk drives, but still recommends that the data on the TR-405 be backed up regularly, it might prove costly.
