Hydra Super-S

Hydra

Maximize your storage capacity with four 3.5" SATA hard drives with the Hydra 4-Bay RAID enclosure. An ultra durable aluminum casing provides efficient heat dissipation, plus an extra large powerful rear fan keeps your hard drives cool during long hours of operation. Advanced RAID technology provides extra protection for all your valuable data content. The Hydra will surpass all your high performance storage needs.

Features

• Configurable hardware RAID controller (RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 5, RAID 10)
• Utilizes hardware accelerated RAID rebuild engine
• Supports SATA II Gen2m specification with 3.0Gbps and 1.5Gbps data rates
• Supports SATA HDD ATA7
• Universal interfaces including eSATA, FireWire 800, FireWire 400 and USB 2.0
• USB mass-storage compliant
• Smart Fan (automatically regulates fan speed according to the internal temperature)
• Alarm buzzer when fan or power supply is defective
• 2TB volume switch for systems that do not support large volumes
• "Hot Swap" removable rack

4-Bay RAID Storage

The Hydra is designed to house up to four 3.5" SATA hard drives with the option to setup your drives with different RAID configurations. Use it as a reliable backup for your important data with RAID 1/10, for optimal performance and speed with RAID 0 striping, or select RAID 5 for the perfect balance between high performance and data integrity. In case of a drive failure, the removable hot swap rack makes installing and replacing the hard drives quick and easy.

Versatile interface featuring eSATA, FireWire and USB in one unit

The Hydra Super-S Combo comes with a choice of four different interfaces all combined into one single unit. FireWire 800 and eSATA where maximizing transfer speed is most important and the more common FireWire 400 or high speed USB 2.0 connections for flexibility to access your data on workstations that do not offer the modern eSATA or FireWire 800 connections. To keep your drives cool, the Hydra uses smart fan technology. It automatically regulates fan speed according to the internal temperature and sounds an alarm when the fan fails to spin up. This function plus the rubber padded feet not only optimises cooling but also reduces the noise level.

Disk Spanning

The drives show up as one large single volume but the total size will depend on the drive with the smallest capacity. Spanning is an array (not RAID) that is written sequentially across the drives. By itself, it does not provide any performance or redundancy benefits.

2 hard drives
4 hard drives

Disk Striping (RAID 0)

The drives show up as one large single volume but the total size will depend on the drive with the smallest capacity. Used where speed is the primary objective but RAID Level 0 (also called striping) is not redundant. This form of array splits each piece of data across the drives in segments; since data is written without any form of parity data-checking, it allows for the fastest data transfer of all other modes. However, if one drive becomes damaged, the whole array can become corrupted.

2 hard drives
4 hard drives

Disk Mirroring (RAID 1)

The drives show up as one volume but only 50% of the total capacity, depending on the drive with the smallest capacity, can be used. RAID 1 creates an exact copy (or mirror) of a set of data on the second drive. This is useful when reliability and backup are more important than data capacity. When one hard drive fails, it can be replaced and the data rebuilt automatically.

2 hard drives

Disk Mirroring with Striping (RAID 10)

The drives show up as one volume but only 50% of the total capacity, depending on the drive with the smallest capacity, can be used. RAID 1 creates an exact copy (or mirror) of a set of data. This is useful when reliability and backup are more important than data capacity. When one hard drive fails, it can be replaced and the data rebuilt automatically.

4 hard drives

Disk Striping with parity(RAID 5)

The drives show up as one volume but the total capacity, depending on the drive with the smallest capacity, is the combined size minus the size of one drive. RAID 5 uses block-level striping with parity data distributed across all member disks and therefore provides the perfect balance between high performance and data integrity. When one hard drive fails, it can be replaced and the data rebuilt automatically.

3 hard drives
4 hard drives
3 hard drives 1 hot spare disk

Remarks

• The difference in performance is only visible for fast interfaces like eSATA.
• Hard drives of identical capacities are recommended. If the capacity is different, the total amount of the space that can be used will depend on the drive with the smallest capacity.

• User manuals
• High resolution images
• Frequently asked questions
• HDD compatibility list
• Firmware

Accessories

Extra HDD trays available on request (P/N: HY-NAS-T)
Carton Size: 46.5.cm x 39.5cm x 35.8cm (40pcs per carton)

Benchmark

Test Environment

PC: Motherboard GA-8I945P, Intel Pentium 4, CPU 3.0GHz, 2GB RAM, Windows XP - FDBench v1.01
Mac: MacPro, Intel Xeon Quad Core, CPU 2.8GHz, 4GB RAM, OS 10.5.5 - Quickbench v4.0
HDD: 4x Seagate 250GB (ST3250310AS)

USB 2.0

FireWire 400

FireWire 800

eSATA

Remarks

The difference in transfer speed for the different RAID modes is most pronounced for fast interfaces like eSATA.