2.5" RAID systems with SATA drives, on the other hand, where high capacity mostly matters, were less attractive due to the restriction to 500 GB per drive (opposed to 2 TB with 3.5" technology): In a rack cabinet only 12 TB could be supplied on 2 U, as opposed to 24 TB with twelve 3.5" disks in the same space.
With the new Seagate Constellation ST91000640NS, the capacity has been doubled to 1 TB. EUROstor offers this drive, which is designed for Enterprise applications, in her RAID systems and Storage Appliances.
2.5" disks furthermore consume much less power than 3.5" models, as their motors have to move only small platters. This decisively reduces the total cost of ownership.
EUROstor uses these new disk drives in her hardware RAID systems, single and dual controller with FC, SAS and iSCSI interface. And they are built into EUROstor storage servers, which can be used as combined NAS and iSCSI appliances and iSCSI clusters with automatic failover.
All these systems can also be equipped with mixed drive technologies, SATA, SAS and SSD, in order to provide the optimum storage type for each application.
"Today the reasons to use 3.5" drives in RAID systems are getting fewer. In fact, it is the basic concept of RAID to spread data over many single spindles: Rebuild of a single disk is much faster, and especially with the mixed use of SAS and SATA (and maybe also SSD), RAID systems with less than 24 disks loose too much capacity for parity information." says Franz Bochtler, President of EUROstor. "The growing sales figures of 2.5" disk RAIDs show, that customers perfectly understand this."
The price, e.g. for a ES-8700 Storage Server with Open-E DSS (NAS and iSCSI), with 1 TB Enterprise SATA 2.5" disks and hardware RAID 6 controller, amounts to € 9,865.10 including VAT (€ 8,290.- without VAT) for 24 disks on 2 U.
With 8 disks on 1 U, it amounts to € 5,462.10 including VAT (€ 4,590.- without VAT).