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Accuta DAS: A fully built-in RAID personal storage

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PCQ Bureau
New Update

For those seeking personal storage in excess of capacities normally available on a hard disk, the Accuta DAS may be the right deal. DAS or Direct Attached Storage is exactly what this device promises-direct connectivity to a PC or Mac, using either USB or

FireWire. You can connect to the device using the provided serial port and control it, but this is mostly unnecessary. The Accuta supports all hardware RAID levels (0 to 5) and this makes it reliable for storage and live back up purposes.

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Potential customers are those requiring a simple plug-in device that can mostly manage the required complexities itself and present a simple-to-use interface to them. The Accuta's RAID and other storage-management features are completely black-boxed from the user and the whole unit appears as a single drive in Windows explorer. You can simply drag and drop your files and data to this drive, and not bother about how and where exactly the unit is storing them. 



A small warning though, you need to replace the failed drive with another, exactly, of the same specifications. Also, take care that the drive's IDE cable slot matches the orientation of the one you are replacing-there is no place inside the cassette to turn the cable around.

The Accuta's management software only allows you to set up an e-mail account and server configuration and a display of logs that always remained empty for us

regardless of any errors we simulated.

We ran the WinBench 99's HEW (High-End Winstone) and BDW (Business Disk

Winstone) tests. The drive perfomed at 2450 Kb per sec overall in BDW and 10,300 Kb per sec in HEW. Access time was poor at 25.3 mins for disk access, with 7.26% CPU utilization. The CPU here is the main processor of our test machine and its low use portends well for the drive's own performance. Data transfer rate was clocked at 28,200 Kb per sec. This reflects the times and speeds of all four drives seen through a RAID controller. RAID is used to enhance performance, and the numbers above are below par compared to the high-end hard disks we had reviewed in the shootout for our Dec 2004 issue. These figures are dependent on the hard disks you place in the unit.

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To set it up, you need to toggle a few dip-switches at the rear of the unit, plug in four hard disks and turn it on. We had four 40 GB hard disks from different vendors. Rebuilding RAID 5 in this configuration took 20

mins. Switching to or rebuilding a new RAID level without drive-replacement requires a lot of hot-swap and on/off sequences. It requires all four hard disks plugged in to turn on. Data reliability is excellent and it continues to be available while a re-build is in progress after a drive replacement. 

The Bottom Line: Reasonable performance, but could do better on access times and speeds. The price tag is a little steep for the package.

Sujay V Sarma

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