System Industries Inc, continuing to go two or three better than DEC in the storage field, has announced a family of disk subsystems that surpass the capacity and performance of DEC’s SA482. The Milpitas, California company’s new SI83 disk drive is the foundation for System Industries’ SI883 C-Series storage array. The SI883 can provide more than 4Gb of formatted storage in a standard cabinet. It can be attached directly to DEC’s HSC50, HSC70, KDB50, KDA50 and UDA50 controllers. The SI883 packages eight SI83s in a single footprint – enabling System Industries to exceed the four drive capacity of DEC’s SA482 by 68%. The SI883 provides an additional 1.5Gb in the same floor space – at a lower cost per megabyte. The new SI83 drives deliver an average seek time of only 16ms, which is 33% faster than DEC’s latest offering, claims Jay Greenberg, senior vice president of engineering. Furthermore, advanced mechanical features, such as dual supported spindles and cartridges, help SI83 disk drives achieve a mean-time-between-failures rating of more than 35,000 hours. Dual channel capabilities are standard on the SI883 C-Series, allowing fault-tolerant configurations for DEC systems employing two discrete disk servers. SI483 and SI883 C-Series subsystems are due to be available for delivery early next month. Prices range from $16,000 for a single drive to $115,000 for a complete SI883 power pack configuration.
