| AIC BR-28 SAS Storage Cannister |
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Introduction:
During our coverage of SC06 we had a chance to check out the latest in server technology and ran across a company offering storage solutions which take up very little space, have low power consumption, and offer excellent performance. While this technology is offered primarily to the server and mass storage market customers the application and technology is finding its way into many consumer desktops.
We arranged to provide our readers with a look at the remarkable BR-28 SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) hard drive canister sent to us by Advanced Industrial Computer, Inc. (AIC) Xtore Extreme Storage.
This is a switch for what most users are familiar with, as many are only aware of IDE, SATA, SCSI, and laptop hard drives. SAS is a relatively new technology to hit the PC market. The SAS drives in this review are about the size of your standard laptop hard drive, but its platter spins at 10k RPM. The canister is designed with a hot-swappable configuration which can be extremely useful in some situations. Home users may find this feature useful for swapping data drives and having access to data that may not reside on their machine without the need to reboot. This feature is exceptionally useful in server applications where it is being assembled for high availability, then with the proper RAID controller and a properly configured RAID volume the server would not need to be powered down to swap out the drive or risk the loss of any data. The canister was sent to TWL with eight Seagate SAS drives of 73 gigs each and a few cables to connect the canister to the RAID controller.
Specs
| Model Number | BR-28 |
| Materials : | Heavy-duty cold-rolled steel |
| Finish : | Zinc-plated with black chromate |
| Dimensions : W x D x H |
mm : 146 x 192.5 x 83.8 inches : 5.75 x 8.25 x 3.25 |
| Cooling : | Rear : 2 x 60x25mm fans |
| Indicators | HDD LED’s |
| Drive Bay | 3.5” hot-swap 8 |
| Temperature | 0ºC(32ºF) ~ 50ºC(122ºF) |
| Humidity | 5%~95% non-condensing |
| Net Weight | 1 kg / 2.2 lbs |
| Cubic Feet | 0.3 |
| Packaging Dimension (W x D x H) : | mm : 270 x 220 x 150 |
| Backplane : Description |
S Parallel SCSI U320 SA Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) 3.0 |
What we find interesting here is that the unit takes up only two standard 5 1/4 inch bays and offers the ability to compact 8 drives into that space while utilizing only 2 molex power connectors as you will see later. Additionally the cannister is rated for temperatures that range from 0ºC(32ºF) ~ 50ºC(122ºF) so obviously this drive cannister is not expected to heat up very much.
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