Fast RAID Storage For Any Desktop

AMCC's 3ware Sidecar is one of the fastest and most versatile RAID storage solutions ever tested in the CRN Test Center.

Even though the Sidecar is marketed for the Power Mac G5, the box works well with Windows- and Linux-based PCs. The 3ware Sidecar supports enterprise Linux operating systems such as RedHat, SuSE, Fedora and FreeBSD.

PRODUCT: AMCC 3ware Sidecar PRICE: $1,295 WARRANTY: 965OSE, 3 years; RDE-400-xSATA, 1 year. DISTRIBUTORS/ INTEGRATORS: Bell Microproducts, Synnex, D&H Distributing COMPANY: Applied Micro Circuits Corp. (AMCC) Sunnyvale, calif. (408) 542-8600 www.amcc.com

In addition, the company has developed firmware for three controller cards to support these operating systems. The Sidecar comes with four drive trays and can accept up to 3 Tbytes of SATA I and II storage.

Installing and connecting the Sidecar took just minutes. Engineers tested the Sidecar with four 150-Gbyte Western Digital SATA hard drives. The 3ware Sidecar comes with a 9550SE-4LPME PCI Express RAID controller card.

AMCC also provides a 3DM 2 software bundle to control the Sidecar and manage the hard drives. Each drive is controlled by individual ports, so users do not have to use all the drives on a single RAID configuration. In fact, users can create up to four different RAID configurations. The 3ware Sidecar accepts RAID 0, 1, 5 and 10.

Recognizing different configurations requires some knowledge of an OS—the 3DM 2 software does not take care of this step. As a result, custom system builders must work with OS images that were manually prepared because if they don't, the user will need to know how to mount drives, create volumes and manage the drives.

For testing, the Sidecar was configured with RAID 0, and several large files were copied and timed between the Sidecar drives and an internal 750-Gbyte SATA drive. The results yielded no discernible differences between the two; concluding that the Sidecar performed just as fast as the internal hard drives.