Raymond Engineering RAIDs PCMCIA Storage

PCMCIA-based storage offers many advantages over its current alternatives. It’s smaller, more portable, reasonably rugged, and consumes considerably less power. However, it is still in the early stages of being accepted as a mainstream solution in a wide range of important applications.

A new product developed by Connecticut-based Raymond Engineering, and on display at COMDEX, promises to change the way we look at PCMCIA storage. Raymond claims that the device, dubbed the miniRAID, is the world’s smallest ruggedized RAID system using flash disk technology making it, for the first time, applicable to a new set of commercial and industrial environments.

RAID, or Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks, is a fault-tolerant architecture that is often used to ensure data integrity in critical applications. By incorporating PCMCIA-based flash memory storage into a RAID system, Raymond is able to provide a compact, lightweight, and low-power solution to storage problems in industries such as oil and gas exploration, mining, forestry, construction, site monitoring, and others.

The miniRAID accepts nine PCMCIA flash memory cards, providing up to 320 MB of ruggedized RAID storage. The unit mounts in a 5 1/4″ half-height bay in a host computer, or is capable of standing alone as a desktop unit. The miniRAID weighs about 2.6 lbs. (1.2 kg), and draws less than 7 watts of power, comparing very favorably to conventional RAID systems.

The miniRAID connects to a host computer using a fast SCSI-2 interface, and is upgradeable to higher density storage cards as they come available via minimal software enhancements.

Raymond Engineering
Mary Ann Dostaler
217 Smith Street
Middletown, CT 06457-9990
(203) 632-4616
(203) 632-4366 (fax)
[email protected]