360 Systems MAXX-2420EX - Manual (Page 101)

MAXX-2420-EX Owner’s Manual Page 101
Hard Disk Management
MAXX-2420-EX employs an advanced Serial-ATA controller that manages eight high-capacity
hard disks operating in a RAID-5 configuration. This design increases system performance, and by
storing parity data, can survive the complete loss of a drive in the array without data loss.
The MAXX-2420-EX brings a high level of reliability to Serial-ATA RAID through a switched
architecture that exceeds the reliability of SCSI shared-bus storage systems. The earlier shared-bus
architecture of SCSI had inherent performance limitations due to arbitration latency, since only one
drive may use the bus at a time. Further, a single drive failure could bring the entire storage system
down.
By contrast, the MAXX-2420-EX uses a non-blocking switched architecture to isolate the drives
from one another. Any drive failure makes that drive unavailable and the rest of the storage system
remains undisturbed. In addition, the MAXX-2420-EX uses Advanced Data Protection features,
where all drive commands are checked to ensure that no command corruption has taken place over
the entire data path.
Some of the MAXX-2420-EX’s RAID-5 implementation features and benefits include:
• Non-blocking switch technology with RAID-5 parity
• On-board processor minimizes host CPU overhead
• Easy-to-configure arrays
• Dynamic sector repair for robust data protection
• Accelerated RAID-5 writes
• Easy drive replacement from front panel