Introduction and Specs

Mylex eXtremeRAID 2000 Review

This content was originally featured on Amdmb.com and has been converted to PC Perspective’s website. Some color changes and flaws may appear.

This review will focus on the Mylex’s flagship, eXtreme RAID 2000. Before I start, lets cover some background on this IBM company.

Mylex eXtremeRAID 2000 Review - Storage 7 Mylex, an IBM company, develops intelligent, high performance hardware and software for moving, storing, protecting and managing data in desktop and networked environments. Mylex is headquartered in Fremont, California and has research and development facilities in Fremont, California, Boulder, Colorado and Rochester, Minnesota. Mylex is ISO 9001 Certified. Mylex was founded in 1983 and acquired by IBM in September 1999. IBM is the world’s largest information technology provider with hardware, software and service products and is the worldwide leader in e-business solutions. IBM’s 1999 revenue exceeded $87 billion. The company has more than 300,000 employees and does business in more than 160 countries.

Lets cover the specifics of the eXtreme RAID 2000.

SCSI SPECIFICATIONS

  • Supports SCSI1, SCSI2, Ultra SCSI, Ultra2 and Ultra 160 SCSI devices
  • Full support for Low Voltage Differential (LVD) devices Up to 160MB/sec burst data rate per Ultra 160 SCSI channel
  • Automatic SCSI bus termination
  • Disconnect/Reconnect
  • 255 scatter/gather address pairs
  • 512 concurrent host commands
  • 256 tagged commands per controller
  • 64 drive groups
  • 16 drives per drive group
  • Automatic sector remapping
  • Ultra 160 SCSI (LVD), cable lengths up to 25 meters for two devices or 12 meters for 15 devices
  • Four Wide Ultra 160 SCSI LVD channels
  • Supports up to 4.32TB (using 72GB drives)
  • 15 devices per channel
  • 60 devices per controller

RAID FAULT TOLERANT AND FLEXIBILITY FEATURES

  • RAID levels 0, 1, 0+1, 3, 5, 10, 30, 50, JBOD
  • Transparent disk drive rebuild
  • Mylex Online RAID expansion (M.O.R.E.)
  • Up to 32 controllers per system (NT)
  • Logical drive size of 2 TB, 32 logical controller/ drives
  • Immediate RAID Availability; background initialization
  • Variable stripe size per controller
  • Variable cache line size per controller
  • Up to eight non-disk devices per controller
  • Drive roaming during power off
  • SAF-TE and SES enclosure management
  • Automatic error recovery
  • Write-through or write-back cache support
  • Automatic detection of failed drives
  • Automatic rebuild of hot spare drive
  • Hot drive swapping support
  • Support for SMART capable drives
  • Configuration data stored on disk and NVRAM
  • PCI Hot Plug (Windows 2000, Windows NT and NetWare)

RAID MANAGEMENT
Global Array Manager (GAM)
— Client server GUI interface
— Create, manage, expand and monitor programs
— Error statistics and performance information
RAID EzAssist: BIOS resident – RAID configurator
— Automated menus for easy configuration
— Custom menus for advanced users

SYSTEM DRIVER SUPPORT
Windows 2000
Professional edition, server and advanced server
Windows NT server 4.0 and Enterprise edition
NetWare 4.11 and above, 5.x and SMP with NWPA
SCO UnixWare 7.x
UNIX OSR 5.0.4, 5.0.5
DOS 6.x and above
Solaris 7 (x86)
Linux

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