Other World Computing is offering a 1U rack-mountable storage solution for OS X (10.2 or later) and Windows (XP or higher) that has four bays or data channels offering up to 12 terabytes (TB) of capacity funnelled through one port and one cable connection using a mini-SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) cable that can achieve up to 24 gigabits per second of throughput speed. The unit is called the Mercury Rack Pro Mini-SAS.
The company is offering the rack, which features trayless drive bays and a disk utility software bundle for both platforms, in eight pre-configured solutions, ranging from 2TB ($500) to 12TB ($1,100) using 6Gb-per-second storage devices or data channels. The unit can be used like a four-bay JBOD drive dock, allowing users to mix-and-match drives as well as hot-swap them. Users can also choose to use the device as a RAID (requires RAID software or a SAS-SATA RAID controller card, RAID 0 or SPAN only).
The drives used by OWC in the Mercury Rack Pro are covered by a two-year warranty, or can be substituted with enterprise-class SATA hard drives with five-year warranties, which include a one-year overnight cross-ship warranty and three years of data recovery services if needed.
Although designed to fit the standard 1U rack space, the device comes with removable rack mounting “ears” and included anti-skid feet that make it available for use as a desktop unit. It supports SAS-SATA 3.5-inch drives of up to 15,000rpm, and features three cooling fans, LEDs for activity and drive status, and an international-ready 100/240V power supply.
Disk utilities included in the purchase include Prosoft’s Data Backup 3, NovaStor NovaBackUp (Windows only), Intech’s SpeedTools Utilities (for connecting to older Macs) and Bombich Software’s Carbon Copy Cloner (Mac only).
