iMT Incorporated proposes to construct a Compact Terabyte RAID Disk System that provides 0.5 Terabytes of storage in a rugged 10U rack mount package. The baseline proposal is for a RAID Level 2 system with full on-the-fly error recovery, hot swappable disks, and dual bit error detection. The system will rely on a fully redundant commercial controller design. It is expected that the Year 2000 cost of the storage modules will be approximately $24,000 for a total system cost significantly less than $50,000. The electronics and software design will be fully prototyped during the first phase of the effort allowing tests to be conducted to verify critical functionality and performance. The design and development will be completed as part of a future Phase II effort. As part of Phase I, trade studies on the following subjects will be conducted: - RAID Comparison Study, - Firewire, UltraSCSI and SCSI tradeoff analysis, - Input buffering analysis, - Output buffering analysis, and - Disk drive recovery modeling. A SRR and PDR of the resulting design will be conducted.
Benefit: The on-the-fly error correction capabilities of a Level II RAID system are considered key for the marketing of the technology within the emerging digital television marketplace. In addition to expanded military use, it is anticipated that with its cost-effective use of redundant commercial technologies the system will be widely used in the development and broadcast of new digital television formats.
Keywords: Terabyte, Terabyte, RAID, Disk, UNIX, Mil-S-901, Class, A, Storage, FireWire
