14 DAY TRIAL // LaCie announced one of the biggest data storage solutions available for video editing professionals and digital content creation applications. The new array has a maximum storage capacity of 5TB and it features a 10-bit uncompressed HD playback support implemented at hardware level.
According to the company's press release concerning this product, the 5TB RAID array comes with the eSATA II interface that supports direct eSATA-to-SATA connection as the external interface is eSATA, while the internal, toward hard disk drives interface is SATA II too. Because of the fast interfaces used the array is capable of burst speeds of 200MB per second. If necessary, a number of maximum four such storage arrays can be linked together using the included eSATA PCI-X/Express Card in order to achieve a massive 20TB solution with a burst speed of over 600MB per second.
"LaCie Biggest S2S 5TB is probably the most cost-efficient solution for HD/SD video editing and post-production," said Olivier Mirloup, LaCie Hard Disk Drive Business Unit Manager. "It offers fast performance and data integrity in a single unit up to 5TB. In RAID 0, the ultra-fast eSATA interface offers enough speed to edit hours of 10-bit HD uncompressed or play back up to six 8-bit SD video streams. This can even be drastically improved combining several S2S units, revolutionizing a market driven so far by much less cost-effective solutions, such as SCSI/fiber technologies."
As the disks inside the storage array are SATA II compliant, they are hot-swappable allowing users to instantly expand or replace any number of drives without the need to power down the system first. A number of different RAID configurations are also available from the RAID 0 that is centered on speed to the RAID 1 that allows for a better data protection and finally to the mixed RAID 0+1 solution. "LaCie Biggest S2S comes with a 4-port PCI card for immediate use. Users can select the LaCie SATA II 3Gbits/s PCI-Express Card 4E or LaCie SATA II 3Gbits/s PCI-X Card 4E with four ports and a native x8 host bus interface. Thanks to port multiplication, all five disks are connected to a single port on the LaCie SATA II 3Gbits/s PCI-Express Card 4E."
LaCie's storage array for video professionals are available in two general configurations priced at $3,699 for the model with a PCI-X Card and $3,799 for the one with PCI-E Card. Operating system support is general, all Microsoft's Windows versions are supported as well as Linux distributions based on a newer kernel.