Ciprico 6500 manual Features and Options, Scsi Compatibility, Parity Drive

Chapter 1 Description

Page 1 - 4 Features and Options

Features and Options

SCSI Compatibility

•Conforms to SCSI-2 standards.

•8- or 16-bit data transfers on host inte rface.

•Single-ended or differential SCSI interface.

•Compatible with industry-standard SCSI adapters and drivers, including all Ciprico SCSI host bus adapters.

Controller Board

Disk Drives

Redundancy

Parallel Disk

Array

Architecture

SCSI-2 to ATA RAID-3 disk array controller with a 16-bit host SCSI interface and 9 ATA interfaces.

9 ATA disk drives (8 data, one parity).

Continued operation after failure of a single data drive.

Ciprico’s 6500 parallel disk array communicates with an initiator (or host) via the SCSI-2 industry standard interface. The array’s design combines current drive technology with an advanced controller board, where data is “striped” across eight drives at once. Byte-striping involves partitioning of data into bytes, with each byte assigned to a particular drive and all bytes written to the drives simultaneously. Using this method, transfer rates for read/write functions are significantly faster than a single disk drive having the same capacity.

Parity Drive	Improved reliability and data availability are provided by a dedicated parity
	drive. As data is striped to the eight data drives, parity data is generated and
	stored on the parity drive. Parity information is used to verify data integrity
	when reading from the drives, and to regenerate data if a drive should fail and
	is replaced. A single drive failure will not degrade overall performance. Use of

21020690 B 6500 Disk Array User’s Guide