Mylex Corp of Fremont, California has released a five-channel disk array subsystem, claiming it is the fastest available: it has five drive bays for up to 10Gb of storage, five 16-bit SCSI-2 channels, a 32-bit Intel 80960CA RISC processor, up to 64Mb of write-back cache memory and supports RAID levels 0, 1 and 5; other features include automatic drive failure detection, hot replacement, transparent rebuild and hot standby; the system runs under Santa Cruz Operation Inc Unix 3.2.4 or Novell Inc NetWare 3.11; Mylex says the subsystem will support Windows NT and OS/2 2.0 in the future; the array controller is an EISA board with interchangeable daughterboards for compatibility with 8-bit or 16-bit single-ended and differential SCSI transceivers, and there are five SCSI-2 channels; throughput is 33Mb per second in burst mode and up to 20 SCSI drives can be connected to a single controller, yielding 40Gb using 2Gb 5.25 drives; several controllers can be used for additional capacity; when a drive fails, the controller detects the fault, attempts several retries, disables the drive, alerts the administrator and continues operating the remaining drives; when a new drive is installed, a transparent rebuild utility replaces the data without disturbing the rest of the system and it can be configured to substitute a standby drive for a failed drive; costs go from $21,100 for a 2Gb array to $38,184 for a 10Gb array.
