Video pros and prosumers serious about their storage needs have long had a variety of choices in the realm of FireWire RAIDs.? The 3ware Sidecar from AMCC brings another option that offers higher performance through a SATA II RAID enclosure. Featuring four hot-swappable bays (up to 3 TB of storage), a hardware RAID controller (Raid 0, 1, 5, and JBOD), and theoretical throughput of up to 3Gb/s (300MB/s) ? while real-world throughput is lower than that, the Sidecar still offers substantially higher throughput than even a FireWire 800 RAID can offer.
Of PCI-Express Cards and Hardware Controllers
The unitis speed is achieved through a combination of SATA II bandwidth ? that theoretical 300 MB/s throughput I mentioned ? and a PCIExpress hardware RAID controller that ships with the Sidecar.? The latter limits it to use with the last generation of PowerMac G5s and all of the so-far shipped Intel-based Mac Pros. The card is installable into a free PCI-Express slot.
| NOTE: The folks at AMCC pointed out to me that the 300MB/s is per lane, which translates into a itotali system performance of 1,200MB/s (4 lanes x 300MB/s).? That makes SATA II four times faster than eSATA, and several times faster than FireWire 800 (80MB/s). |