Hitachi Ltd has announced two new disk subsystems: the high-performance DF200-5/11, with 5.7Gb or 11.4Gb of memory, and the high-performance disk array, the DF100-17/34, with a memory capacity of 17Gb or 34Gb. The former device incorporates a maximum of 64Mb of cache memory with a battery back-up, and as well carries an Intel Corp 80960CA […]
Hitachi Ltd has announced two new disk subsystems: the high-performance DF200-5/11, with 5.7Gb or 11.4Gb of memory, and the high-performance disk array, the DF100-17/34, with a memory capacity of 17Gb or 34Gb. The former device incorporates a maximum of 64Mb of cache memory with a battery back-up, and as well carries an Intel Corp 80960CA RISC chip, thus reducing control overheads on the host processor; it also has an SCSI-2 interface and an RS232 serial interface for remote maintenance. The DF100-17/34 disk array consists of eight 5.25 disk array subsystems, each subsystem having six disks for data, one disk powered by the battery and one spare disk. Each such string can achieve up to 17.2Gb of data. Fault tolerance is provided by the one hot standby spare disk per string, and error checking is enhanced by a proprietary byte data verification check code which is automatically added by the controller. A maximum speed of 10M-bytes per second is achieved in continuous read-write operations. Sample prices are from around $82,000 for the DF-200/5 to $320,000 for the DF100-34 disk subsystem. The units re intended for use with personal computers through to workstations and office processors. The DF100 series supports RAID-4 and will support RAID-5 from August 1993, the company says, putting it a little behind IBM Corp. Like IBM, it does not yet have a mainframe disk array out yet.
