Conclusion
We believe that, sooner or later, 2.5" hard disks will start to replace 3.5" in the enterprise market, due to the advantages they offer over classic hard drives. Their power consumption is much lower, and so are their cooling requirements. Thanks to the little space they require, more drives can be stored in the same environment, which also contributes to better performance.
The only area where 3.5" drives have a clear advantage over 2.5" models drives is in sheer capacity. The largest 3.5" SCSI hard drives offer a capacity of 300 GB today, which is far beyond the Savvios' 74 GB. This differential will only change if Seagate manages to develop 2.5" drives offering more capacity before the 3.5" models happen to increase their capacity again.
StorCase's InfoStation is one of the first products that targets markets requiring high storage with low space requirements. Ten drive bays offer vast flexibility for creating one or several drive arrays. Creating high-availability setups using RAID 6 or nested RAID configurations is also not a problem. Thanks to two independent SCSI channels, the InfoStation can be controlled by two different SCSI ports, controllers or even systems. StorCase decided to use Ultra320 SCSI as the main interface, enabling easy integration into existing systems.
The 19" unit is well-finished and the hot-swap frames based on SCA ensure problem-free handling. Furthermore, the slim system does not require noisy or sophisticated cooling and thus works as quietly as a standard high-end computer.
If you are not yet using a RAID controller, StorCase also offers a better equipped version of the InfoStation that includes an integrated RAID unit with XOR engine and 128 MB ECC cache. It supports all the common RAID modes. Of course, this version is more expensive, but it allows you to add RAID storage to your architecture without making any hardware changes.
