Description

Feature Summary

• Best build quality available
• Best chipset - Oxford 936QSE
• Best disks - Fast Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 SATA-II
• Latest 7200.11 disk model with 32MB cache
• RAID 0 or 3 for striping, or RAID 5 or 10 for Mirroring
• eSATA & Firewire 800 & 400 & USB 2.0
• Latest Perpendicular Recording Technology
• PC & Mac compatible
• Can be used as Mac boot disk
• Temperature Control intelligent fan
• Inbuilt mains power supply
• Full 2 Year Warranty

This TOP QUALITY ALUMINIUM external quad-disk RAID drive is aimed at professional audio / video editors, or those serious about performance and reliability of their data.

If you are using serious applications like Pro Tools, Premiere, Final Cut Pro, then look no further!   The Oxford 936 firewire chipset is considered essential by serious editors, due to its performance and stability.

For example, see how Pro Tools maker DigiDesign specify using Oxford-based firewire disks. See link here.

Uses Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 disk built on perpendicular recording technology  to deliver new levels of hard drive data density, capacity and reliability.

You can configure the disk drive using RAID mirroring and striping.  See the detailed information below for various RAID modes.   It is simple to use the LCD display to choose RAID mode.  And a hardware (mechanical) switch allows the mode to be locked to prevent accidental changing.

The LCD Display shows useful information such as system and disk drive temperature and fan speed.  Example screenshots:

This product works wonderfully with any PC or Mac. We pre-format for  Mac (HFS+).  Please let us know if you are a PC user when you order so we can reformat in NTFS for you.

This is a very high quality product.  All aspects of the product are the best quality on the market.

The intelligent fan control enables the unit to keep the disks cool using the minimum of fan noise.  Even when the fan is in use, the unit doesn't make much noise, so it can be used in any office environment.

The whole product has a 2 year warranty, that includes everything - the disk enclosure and disk drives. 

	Hydra RAID quad disk enclosure with 4x 1.5TB Disks		eSATA data lead (1.8m) USB 2.0 data lead (1.8m) 9-pin to 9-pin Firewire 800 data lead (1.8m) 6-pin to 6-pin Firewire 400 data lead (1.8m)

Warranty

2 year, return to base. 

Product Specification

RAID Setup

Note: The difference in performance is only visible for fast interfaces like eSATA.
Disk Spanning The drives show up as one large single volume but the total size will depend on the drive with the smallest capacity. Spanning is an array (not RAID) that is written sequentially across the drives. By itself, it does not provide any performance or redundancy benefits.
2 hard drives
4 hard drives
Disk Striping (RAID 0) The drives show up as one large single volume but the total size will depend on the drive with the smallest capacity. Used where speed is the primary objective but RAID Level 0 (also called striping) is not redundant. This form of array splits each piece of data across the drives in segments; since data is written without any form of parity data-checking, it allows for the fastest data transfer of all other modes. However, if one drive becomes damaged, the whole array can become corrupted.
2 hard drives
4 hard drives
Disk Mirroring (RAID 1) The drives show up as one volume but only 50% of the total capacity, depending on the drive with the smallest capacity, can be used. RAID 1 creates an exact copy (or mirror) of a set of data on the second drive. This is useful when reliability and backup are more important than data capacity. When one hard drive fails, it can be replaced and the data rebuilt automatically.
2 hard drives
Disk Mirroring with Striping (RAID 10) The drives show up as one volume but only 50% of the total capacity, depending on the drive with the smallest capacity, can be used. RAID 1 creates an exact copy (or mirror) of a set of data. This is useful when reliability and backup are more important than data capacity. When one hard drive fails, it can be replaced and the data rebuilt automatically.
4 hard drives
Disk Striping with dedicated parity (RAID 3) The drives show up as one volume but the total capacity, depending on the drive with the smallest capacity, is the combined size minus the size of one drive. RAID 3 uses byte-level striping with parity data stored on a dedicated disk. The single parity disk is a bottle-neck for writing since every write requires updating the parity data. One minor benefit is the dedicated parity disk allows the parity drive to fail and operation will continue without parity or performance penalty. When one hard drive fails, it can be replaced and the data rebuilt automatically.
3 hard drives
4 hard drives
3 hard drives 1 hot spare disk
Disk Striping with distributed parity (RAID 5) The drives show up as one volume but the total capacity, depending on the drive with the smallest capacity, is the combined size minus the size of one drive. RAID 5 uses block-level striping with parity data distributed across all member disks and therefore provides the perfect balance between high performance and data integrity. When one hard drive fails, it can be replaced and the data rebuilt automatically.
3 hard drives
4 hard drives
3 hard drives 1 hot spare disk
Remarks	Hard drives of identical capacities are recommended. If the capacity is different, the total amount of the space that can be used will depend on the drive with the smallest capacity. Changing the RAID setup will require you to re-format the drives. Make sure you backup all data before doing so!

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