LSI Brings SATA Up A Notch

SATA has made tremendous strides in the NAS and SAN arenas due in part to products from LSI Logic. LSI's latest component, the MegaRAID SATA 300-8x, promises to move the technology even further into the SAN mainstream.

The product is based on the SATA II standard architecture, which is compatible with both SATA I and SATA II drives. The LSI card incorporates native command queuing support, which significantly increases performance in random I/O operations. The technology is great for high data- throughput environments. Each SATA port on the card is capable of managing up to 4 Tbytes of storage. As many as eight drives can be connected at once.

The card is built on Intel components and includes Intel's IOP331 integrated I/O processor. The Intel chip offers higher overall performance for existing I/O processors in storage and embedded applications. The card supports RAID levels 0, 1, 5, 10 and 50. The RAID management capabilities are extensive, and the card ships with two BIOS level utilities and other tools integrators need to ensure proper configurations.

The card also has an optional battery backup to ensure fault tolerance. There are two versions of battery backup support for the MegaRAID SATA 300-8x. The MegaRAID LSIBBU03 has an MSRP of $99, and the MegaRAID LSIiBBU01 has an MSRP of $155. The LSIiBBU01 offers longer retention time in case of a power outage as well as additional self-monitoring and management features. In the case of system failure, the battery's memory cache can enable a backup of up to 72 hours.

The card has an MSRP of $595 and is covered by a three-year warranty.