Eight-Drive RAID SATA Storage System Provides Protection Against Drive Failures, 8TB of Storage, and Improved Speed and Stability
IRVINE, Calif. — April 12, 2010 — Sonnet Technologies today announced that its Fusion™ DX800RAID high-performance, eight-drive RAID SATA storage system was recently purchased by London-based Future Cut Productions, Ltd. for use in the production, mixing, and remixing of albums for Shakira™, Rihanna™, and Sophie Ellis-Bextor. In addition to meeting the company's growing storage needs, the Fusion DX800RAID was chosen by Future Cut for its high performance and ability to keep working in case of a drive failure.
Comprised of Darren Lewis and Tunde Babalola, Future Cut Productions is unique in that it produces most of its music using a Mac® Pro. The process has resulted in a number of hits, including Lilly Allen's debut album "Alright, Still." Prior to their recent purchase of Sonnet's DX800RAID, the duo relied on a sprawling mountain of external FireWire® drives chained together to meet their storage needs, a slow and unreliable solution.
"The DX800RAID has freed up our computer's FireWire bus, which improves stability for our soundcard and outboard digital processors, and its use of a dedicated PCI Express RAID controller provides vastly improved speed over FireWire and USB drives," said Lewis. "Our primary concern in choosing a storage solution was providing a backup in the case of a drive failure. Not only does the DX800RAID offer this capability, but it enabled us to move from a total of 2TB of storage to eight 1TB drives, it has also proved to be a convenient solution for meeting our storage capacity needs for large and numerous music files."
The Fusion DX800RAID is designed to provide reliable, flexible, and high-performance direct attached storage for studio and office use. With its eight drives formatted as a RAID 5 group (data protection for a single-drive failure), a Fusion DX800RAID yields impressive read and write file transfer speeds of up to 815 MB/sec and 715 MB/sec, respectively.
The reliability of the Fusion DX800RAID is further enhanced through SES (SCSI Enclosure Services) 2.0 compliance, a feature more commonly found on enterprise storage systems, as well as enhanced S.M.A.R.T (Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology) data reporting for each hard drive installed in the system. Integrated into the Fusion DX800RAID, SES functionality provides enhanced real-time monitoring and reporting of drive, power supply, and temperature status, all conveyed to the user through utility application screens and the illumination of conveniently placed LEDs on the enclosure. S.M.A.R.T. data criteria can be used to notify the user of an impending drive failure, thus enabling the user to minimize downtime as a result.
"As writers/producers of music, we feel that the Fusion DX800RAID comfortably copes with everything we throw at it. Streaming audio off of a drive is incredibly fast, which means we can continue to build tracks without fear of overloading the system," added Babalola. "It also ensures we can keep working in spite of a possible drive failure, and it improves our workflow by eliminating the need to keep switching external drives."
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About Future Cut Productions, Ltd.
Future Cut Productions, Ltd., a London-based music production company, is comprised of Tunde Babalola and Darren Lewis. The duo first met while promoting rival Drum 'n' Bass nights in Manchester. Since 2004, Future Cut has pursued production, songwriting, mixing, and remixing on behalf of numerous artists. They scored a U.K. number one single with the Lily Allen hit "Smile," which they co-wrote, produced, and mixed. Then they reached number five with the follow-up "L.D.N." The pair also co-wrote, produced, and mixed half of Lily's GRAMMY®-nominated album, as well as B-sides including "Nan You're A Window Shopper" and "U Killed It."
About Sonnet Technologies
Sonnet Technologies Inc. of Irvine, Calif., is a leader in providing storage systems for professional users of Macintosh®, Windows®, and UNIX® systems in the film, video, and broadcast industries. Since its founding in 1986, Sonnet has pioneered and brought to market innovative solutions that enhance the performance and connectivity of Macintosh and industry-standard computers. Today, the company is a world-leading computer hardware upgrade company with a product line featuring a range of high-performance, cost-effective, and reliable storage solutions, as well as a variety of performance-extending upgrade cards. More information is available at www.sonnettech.com.
