Sans Digital RAID Enclosure With Mini-SAS Interface

Sans Digital, a leading provider of high performance storage subsystems, has expanded its TowerRAID series by adding mini-SAS interfaces. The TowerRAID TR4X / TR4X-B is a 4-bay tower with a single mini-SAS connection, while the TR8X / TR8X-B is an 8-bay tower with two mini-SAS connectors.

TowerRAID TR4X-B
4 Bay SAS / SATA JBOD Storage Enclosure

Both units are compatible with the latest SAS hard drives, as well as SATA hard drives, for high transfer rates of up to 400MB/s (4-bay) and 750MB/s (8-bay) when used with a high performance RAID controller card.

Due to increasing positive feedback on its recently released enterprise-level mini-SAS rackmounts, Sans Digital has decided to incorporate the mini-SAS technology into its compact TowerRAID series, making it more readily available to creative professionals, small-businesses and home users. Utilizing high bandwidth mini-SAS (SFF-8088) cabling, the TR4X / TR4X-B and TR8X / TR8X-B support 3Gb/s SAS or SATA hard drives to deliver superior read / write speeds that are crucial in performance-driven environments such as video editing industry and server application. The mini-SAS ports combine four hard drives connections into one, reducing possible points of failures, while preserving uninterrupted data transfer. Both models also support SATA drives, allowing users the option to choose between high performance and high capacity storage solutions. Both the 4-bay and 8-bay units come standard as diskless models. Hard drive and RAID controller bundles options are available. When utilizing a SAS or SATA RAID controller, the units could effortlessly support multi-streaming of compressed high-quality playback or a single-stream of uncompressed 10-bit high definition video under various RAID modes.

The fan-less power supply and ultra quite cooling system provides effective heat dispensing while remaining relatively noise-free. Like the rest of the TowerRAID series, both the 4-bay and 8-bay units are available in silver (TR4X / TR8X) and black (TR4X-B / TR8X-B). “The mini-SAS TowerRAID series is designed with the idea to provide Fibre Channel performance at a fraction of the cost,” stated Grandy Chen, Sans Digital’s President. “Incorporating the newest mini-SAS technology into consumer-level storage units allows fail-safe data keeping for performance-intense applications.”