Sans Digital definitely isn't a household name in the NAS / external storage industry, but the outfit's latest devices are definitely sharp. So sharp, in fact, that we could see them giving the latest from LaCie a run for the design dollars. This week, the company expanded its TowerRAID series by adding mini-SAS interfaces. The TowerRAID TR4X / TR4X-B is a 4-bay tower with a single mini-SAS connection, while the TR8X / TR8X-B is an 8-bay tower with two mini-SAS connectors. Both units are fully compatible with the latest SAS hard drives (not to mention SATA hard drives), and they both promise transfer rates of up to 400MB/sec (4-bay) and 750MB/sec (8-bay) when used in conjunction with a high-performance RAID controller card.


Needless to say, those rates are pretty blazing, and creative professionals the world over should probably take notice. The burgeoning mini-SAS technology is still filtering out slowly to devices, and both of these naturally use the high bandwidth mini-SAS (SFF-8088) cabling in order to fully utilize the speed. The mini-SAS ports combine four hard drives connections into one, reducing possible points of failures, while preserving uninterrupted data transfer. Both models also support SATA drives, allowing users the option to choose between high performance and high capacity storage solutions.


Also of note, the devices can support multi-streaming of compressed playback or single-stream uncompressed playback of 10-bit HD video under various RAID modes, though only when used with a SAS or SATA RAID controller. Like the rest of the TowerRAID series, both the 4-bay and 8-bay units are available in silver (TR4X / TR8X) and black (TR4X-B / TR8X-B), though there is no mention of pricing just yet.