NetCell Expands SyncRAID Family with Storage Processors That Give PC Disk Arrays Unprecedented Speed, Data Protection and Plug-and-Play Simplicity

Business Wire, Sept 7, 2004

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Extended Operating System Support Improves Functionality in Desktop Gaming, Digital Photography, and Prosumer and Professional Video Applications

NetCell today unveiled two storage processors that build on the company's patented SyncRAID(TM) multi-disk acceleration technology to provide breakthrough performance and data protection along with unprecedented simplicity through features like one-button automatic configuration of all drives in the array at start-up.

NetCell's new 3-port NC3000 and 5-port NC5000 storage processors are targeted at host bus adapters for low-cost 3-port drive arrays used in mainstream enthusiast, gaming and home-office server applications, as well as 5-port array adapters for desktop video, high-end streaming applications and small- to mid-sized office servers. The storage processors directly attach to a PC's peripheral component interconnect (PCI or PCI-X) bus and enable high-performance disk arrays to be created using standard, cost-effective ATA drives and serial ATA (SATA) drives. The processors give these arrays the fastest available performance for ATA and SATA disk drives, along with the ability to quickly and easily upgrade capacity, the simplicity of driverless installation, and the option of fail-safe, enterprise-class data security by assigning one of the array's drives to store redundant information for parity protection.

"NetCell has taken the foundational simplicity of SyncRAID's patented disk drive protocol emulation technology, which makes a full-parity stripe RAID drive set appear to any standard operating system device as one large disk, and further improved its functionality and plug-and-play simplicity by adding a number of firmware-based feature enhancements," said Andy Mills, NetCell president and chief executive officer.

Key features of NetCell's new storage processors include such industry-first capabilities as one-button RAID configuration at start-up, auto-configuration within the Windows(R) host-management graphical user interface, and automatic rebuild on drive insert without host intervention or bus loading. The processors also include support for 1394A/B, USB2, and external SATA external RAID boxes with an additional companion chip.

Technical Details

NetCell's NC3000 and NC5000 storage processors build on the company's earlier TD6405 devices to support both 64-bit and mainstream 32-bit PCI buses. They are the world's only single-chip processors to enable direct synchronous striping of data as 64- or 32-bit words onto an array of standard, off-the-shelf ATA or SATA hard disk drives without the need for new or special drivers.

The new storage processors provide superior disk array performance. For instance, in a five-drive 7200 rotations per minute (RPM) ATA drive configuration, the NC5000 delivers an effective 190 to 200 Mbytes/s of sustained read throughput, and up to 110-120 Mbytes/s of sustained write throughput, for a parity-protected array with up to one terabyte of storage capacity using standard 250 Gbyte drives that appear to the host as a single large disk, and soon to be two terabytes with next-generation drives.

Parity protection is implemented using SyncRAID's patented "on-the-fly" hardware exclusive-OR (XOR) engine, which eliminates the traditional read-modify-write sequence associated with traditional striped-parity RAID engines. This approach effectively doubles performance as compared to RAID 5 cards in similar applications.

The hardware XOR engine, coupled with SyncRAID's cache management engine, enables the highest level of read and write I/O performance for multiple drives without having to resort to inefficient disk mirroring schemes such as RAID 10.

NetCell's NC3000 and NC5000 processors can also be used in External Serial ATA implementation in support of the recently adopted SATA International Organization (SATA-IO) standard. External SATA allows external hard drives to perform at full SATA speeds, and NetCell is partnering with Seagate at the Intel Developer Forum, booth #447, this week to demonstrate this technology using several Seagate SATA hard drives configured automatically as a SyncRAID XL striped parity set (see today's Seagate news release). This implementation allows a user to create an external RAID array of fully protected storage using the new External Serial ATA standard. Users can easily increase the scale of storage in terms of performance, capacity and data protection, with a plug-and-play solution that delivers driverless, completely automatic RAID without using the host CPU.

The NC3000 and NC5000 storage processors are available in sample quantities and are scheduled to enter volume production in the fourth calendar quarter of 2004. The processors are priced to enable the development of mainstream PC storage adapter cards that provide RAID 0-Class performance and RAID 5-Class data protection with an MSRP starting at $179.99 for 3-port cards and $249.99 for 5-port cards.

NetCell is a privately held fabless semiconductor company that develops host adapter storage acceleration silicon devices for the ATA and SATA host bus adapter, server, PC, workstation and embedded storage markets. Using a unique patented architecture for writing and reading from multiple disk drives in parallel, NetCell enables a new class of storage product that advances the state of the art for mainstream hard drive storage applications, delivering enterprise-class reliability with better performance, lower cost, and plug-and-play simplicity. Storage products based on NetCell's technology will be aimed at next-generation entertainment PCs and graphics workstations used in media-intensive applications with rigorous performance demands. For more information please visit www.netcell.com.