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January 14, 2003

Transparent hardware RAID for your PC

Here's an interesting product: The Accusys 7500, a transparent hardware RAID device that can be installed in any PC. It takes two IDE hard drives and invisibly clones one to the other, keeping them in sync from then on. It lets you hot-swap in a new drive if one of them fails. All this is done in hardware; to the local OS, it appears as a single hard drive. It fits in the space of two 5 1/4 drive bays.

Tiger Direct sells it for $220. I've never seen one, but Motherboards.org has a review of it, which says it works as advertised. It takes about 3 hours to clone an IBM 40gig/7200RPM drive.

If your average hard drive costs $100, for an extra $300+ you can a significantly more reliable box. Sounds nice for a home server setup.