Winchester Systems RAID Arrays Feature 1 TB SAS Drives

BILLERICA, MA--(Marketwire - December 1, 2008) - Winchester Systems Inc., a leading data storage solutions provider, today announced that their FlashDisk Tiered SAS/SATA RAID disk arrays now support capacities to 80 TB of SAS disks -- featuring new Seagate 1 TB SAS disk drives. The unit provides SAS reliability and performance combined with high capacity and low cost in a single array -- perfect for today's economy when IT managers are compelled to do more with less.

FlashDisk arrays have been optimized to take advantage of these new SAS drives and the performance of the array with 7,200 rpm SAS disks is comparable to the performance with 10,000 rpm SAS disks at far lower cost. FlashDisk with 1 TB SAS disks also deliver 30% higher performance than with SATA disks. This makes FlashDisk with 1 TB SAS disks especially suitable for everyday applications including database queries, file processing, video on demand, and all but the most heavily loaded transaction oriented systems running file services and applications other than mission critical database. The SAS drives also bring an extra measure of reliability compared to SATA disks by providing better end-to-end data integrity checks plus dual drive ports for failover in multi-hosted environments.

"We are very excited about this stunning breakthrough in price, performance and reliability -- especially in today's environment where IT budgets are constrained -- but storage demands continue to expand," explained Mr. Joel Leider, the company's chief executive officer. "Our powerful ASIC-powered FlashDisk systems deliver SAS reliability and performance combined with the overwhelming economy of 1 TB disk drives," he exclaimed. "Now, we can deliver an economical array for the vast majority of applications at literally a fraction of the cost of traditional enterprise arrays -- simply the best way to do more with less."

The company offers two product families, the SX-2300 Series with 12-drive enclosures that expand to 60 TB and the SX-3400 Series with 16-drive enclosures that expand to 80 TB. Each system includes a base unit and up to four expansion shelves. These high performance tiered storage units support both SAS and SATA disks with single or dual redundant failover controllers.

FlashDisk SX-family arrays use high-speed caching RAID controllers designed for speed with dedicated ASICs for parity and dual parity in RAID 6. While both the SAS and SATA disk drives offer 1 TB and rotate at 7,200 rpm, FlashDisk arrays take full advantage of performance features of the new SAS 1 TB disks, including their dual-port, full-duplex reads and writes plus queuing and caching improvements.

RAID 6 offers dual parity for the utmost in data protection for valuable data. Even if two disk drives fail or become unreadable, the data will remain intact. This RAID 6 protection is invaluable for protecting irreplaceable or irreproducible photos and video -- particularly for field use where hardware is vulnerable. According to the company's white paper, "Enterprise RAID 6," RAID 6 dual parity offers 500 to 30,000 times longer MTDL (Mean Time To Data Loss) than RAID 5. An informative 6-minute presentation "RAID 6 Essentials" is also available.

Pricing starts at under $25,000 and delivery is 1-3 weeks ARO.

About Winchester Systems Inc.

Winchester Systems provides network-attached storage, direct-attached storage, tiered-storage, storage area network and enterprise data storage solutions for commercial, industrial, healthcare, education, government and military applications. These solutions include high performance iSCSI, SAS, SCSI, SATA and Fibre Channel RAID disk arrays; tape backup devices and other high performance commercial and military grade data storage for mid-range servers including Windows, Windows Clusters, Linux, Linux Clusters, and UNIX. For more information visit Winchester Systems on the web at www.winsys.com.

Contact Information: Contact: Joel Leider Chief Executive Officer Winchester Systems Inc. 800-325-3700