Price:
As tested AU$39,979
Test configuration:
28 x Maxtor Maxline II Model 5A300J0 ATA/133 drives (8.4TB raw) in a RAID 5 configuration.
Drive specs:
- Capacity: 300GB
- Rotational speed: 5400 RPM
- Average seek: 10ms
- Buffer: 2MB
- MTBF: 1,000,000 hours (but only in low I/O secondary storage applications)
We should also note that if you don't need such a high capacity, Nexsan also offer a smaller 3U "ATAboy2" with 3 to 14 drives and prices starting from AU$13,995.
The drives themselves, as the name of the unit alludes, are PATA, so they are relatively inexpensive when compared to SCSI for example. Connectivity to the host is via dual port 2Gb Fibre Channel controllers on each of the PATA controller modules.
The ATA RAID controller has a battery-backed cache and three power supplies. An optional second redundant ATA RAID controller can be fitted.
The front panel has a variety of Status LEDs for power supply and power supply blower status, controller and cache battery status, RAID and spares status, as well as a general fault indication.
Managing the ATABeast is very simple as the Web interface is excellent. The graphics and layout are one of the most colourful and user-friendly we have seen and nearly any function you would wish to monitor or reconfigure can be simply accessed from the interface.
Because the ATABeast featured 28 low-cost IDE drives that totalled a whopping 8.4TB it could be argued that this gives the unit an unfair advantage in terms of cost per gigabyte -- with 8.4TB on board the cost is only AU$4.76 per gigabyte. However, we should note that the minimum number of drives you can have in the ATABeast is 28. If, as we mentioned earlier, you do not need such high capacity the ATABaby2 would be a more cost-effective solution.
Overall performance was strong with the ATABeast posting the fastest write to disk with large files and although small file read and write operations were slower than the HP or Adaptec they were still quite impressive.
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