Glyph GT 205 200 GB AIT-4 SCSI - Product Description - Pro Audio and Computers Canada

Five configurable drive bays in a 2U rack space. The GT 205™ is built for serious production environments.

The GT 205 is Glyph's flagship system designed for the utmost in storage capacity, options and performance. Applications where multiple drives are needed, such as audio and video production, will benefit from having four GT Key drive bays and the expansion bay, which can house an AIT tape backup drive, SCSI or FireWire hot-swap receiving bay, DVD-R/RW or CD-R/RW. The 2U enclosure features Glyph's integrity™ FireWire hot-swap interface, three internal power supplies and a near-silent fan. GT Key drives can be interchanged with the GT 051™ tabletop and the GT 103™ 3-bay 1U enclosures. The GT 205 can be configured with four FireWire 400 or FireWire 800 GT Key™ FireWire hot-swap drives in capacities up to 1TB each. The GT 205 comes standard with a three-year warranty, while GT Keys carry an additional overnight advance replacement warranty in the first year.

Features

Compatible with FireWire 400 and FireWire 800 GT Keys
FireWire 400 port accessible on front panel
Expansion bay options (built to order):

•         AIT-1 Turbo (40GB) FireWire or SCSI, AIT-2 Turbo (80GB) FireWire or SCSI, AIT-3 (100GB) SCSI, AIT-4 (200GB) SCSI
•         SCSI Ultra160 or GT Series FireWire hot-swap receiving bay
•         DVD-R or CD-R/RW

Durable Stainless Steel Faceplate
Three Internal power supplies
Whisper quiet fan
3 Year Warranty
2 Year Free Basic Data Recovery
Overnight Advance Replacement on GT Key drives in 1st year of warranty

Glyph uses the IEEE-1394 FireWire interface for interconnections within some of our products. Notable among these are the GT 103, GT 205 and GT 051 FireWire Hotswap units. Here we discuss a little about this Glyph innovation, Integrity™, which is at the heart of our most recent and advanced hard drive products.

The Parallel ATA Interface

Most hard drives are produced with the common parallel ATA/IDE interface, which was designed for fixed-drive use within a computer chassis. The ATA electrical signals, and the ATA software protocols, were never designed to support connection or disconnection of drives while power is applied. That action, called 'hot-plugging', requires special electrical circuits and software, to manage the additional removal of devices, as well as defending against electrical problems when connectors are mated and demated.

Thus, the ATA interface is fundamentally unsuited to hot-plugging. This doesn't mean it can't be done, but it's basically trying to make the interface do something it was never intended to support. And that can cause problems for you in terms of data storage reliability.
FireWire vs. ATA as a Hot-Swappable Interface
As described on the FireWire Page, the IEEE-1394 interface is designed for exactly that kind of mate/demate application. So it was natural that removable drives would be built using FireWire as the interconnect, and portable FireWire hard drives became available to address this need.

But what of rack-mount equipment? Here, you have a rack-mount receiver bay, and you want to remove the drive in a front-panel tray or cartridge — not the entire rack. The rear-facing connections typically don't get unplugged.

Not surprisingly, 'removable' hard drives appeared, which placed an ATA drive in a tray; the tray could be pulled out of a receiver bay and another tray swapped in. But these devices used the ATA interface as the tray/receiver interconnection. This was inexpensive, but meant that the trays could not be truly hot-swapped because the ATA interface and protocol don't support it.

In some products, an ATA-to-FireWire bridge circuit was placed in the rack unit, behind the receiver bay, and the bridge circuit attempted to sense the insertion and removal of the ATA drive (tray). It then translated these events into equivalent FireWire signals. The result could be described as a 'FireWire HotSwap' product, but in fact the hot-swapping was being done at the ATA interface, not the FireWire interface. So all the problems of breaking the ATA interface remained. This was particularly unfortunate in rack-mount gear, because while the ATA interface was being broken at the front of the rack unit, there at the back of the rack was a FireWire interface, and it was always plugged in!

Although this hybrid was functional (and indeed Glyph sold a number of units with this type of setup in previous years), it was far from optimum. So Glyph took a look at this situation, and decided that somebody ought to do it right.
Glyph Integrity™ FireWire HotSwap Interface

So in mid-2002, Glyph engineering designed an interface based on the IEEE-1394a FireWire electrical interface, plus high-reliability SCA-II blind-mate connector technology used in high-end Fibre Channel and SCSI disk arrays, and developed a new interface which was designed from its conception for hot-swapping of hard drives.

The Integrity™ interface, first used in the Glyph GT-Series™ product line, incorporates a number of unique characteristics in addition to the use of existing industry standards. The Glyph FireWire HotSwap Interface has provisions for:

• Two independent FireWire circuits (ports)
• One USB 2.0 circuit (device-side 'B' port)
• 12V, 5V, and 3V power supplies
• Power supply ramping (smooth-start) and current-limit controls
• A range of sensing, signalling, and indicator circuits
• Other features for future use

This interface supports hot-swapping of hard drives in the proper way — using circuits and protocols that were intended for use in hot-swap applications. As you might expect, Glyph's hot-swappable drive cartridges incorporate Glyph's ATA-to-FireWire bridging technology in the cartridge itself, so that when you remove the hard drive from the receiver, you're keeping the drive and its bridge together as a set. The bridge circuit in the Glyph cartridge was the first instance of this interface in a removable product.
Versatile, Expandable, and Compatible

Glyph's FireWire HotSwap technology was first implemented as a receiver on the interconnect backplane of the GT 308's 6-bay receiver chassis. There, each hotswap bay has its own FireWire port, to mate with the FireWire port on the cartridge. On the interconnect backplane, standard FireWire PHY chips serve to interconnect the receivers and channel the data to the FireWire ports on the back panel of the rack unit.

The next product to use Integrity™ was the FireWire HotSwap TableTop unit which has a single receiver port, but is otherwise identical to the Trip2's bigger interconnect. The HotSwap technology scales very well from single-bay units to configurations of almost any reasonable size — remember that FireWire can support up to 63 devices on a single bus!

As FireWire technology advances, the FireWire HotSwap will remain compatible. The recent development of IEEE-1394b (called FireWire-B or FireWire-800) doubles the data rates available over FireWire. Existing Glyph HotSwap receivers will support IEEE-1394b cartridges, and a 1394b version of the receiver interface will be incorporated into the products as well. A future Glyph technical White Paper will discuss the Glyph Integrity™ FireWire HotSwap Interface in greater detail, and describe how this interface can be incorporated into other products as well. Look to Glyph for innovation in high-reliability HotSwap Technology!

Technical Specifications

• Rotational Speed (RPM) - 7200
  
• Interface - FireWire 400 (IEEE 1394a)
  
• Two 6-pin Ports on back panel, one on front panel
  
• Bridging Chip on GT Key - Oxford 911 or 924
  
• Average seek time (read) - 8 milliseconds
  
• Maximum Transfer Rate - 50MB/sec (400Mb/sec)
  
• Sustained Transfer Rate - >36MB/sec
  
• GT Key 800 Buffer Size (cache) - 8MB (160GB, 250GB), 16MB (500GB, 750GB), 32MB (1TB)
  
• Dimensions - H 3.5inch x W 19inch x D 16inch
  
• Configuration - 19inch Rack width, 16inch deep
  
• Weight - 17 lbs. / 8 kg (w/o GT Keys)
  
• 28 lbs. / 13 kg (fully loaded)
  
• Internal Power Supply - Universal 100-240v 50/60 Hz
  
• Operating System Compatibility - Apple OS 8.6, 9.X, 10.X
  
• Microsoft Windows 98SE, ME, 2000, XP, Vista
  
• Modern Unix-based, Linux, or BSD
  
• Content Creation Applications - Qualified with all major audio production packages that support FireWire storage, including
  
• Digidesign Pro Tools, Steinberg Nuendo and Cubase, Apple Logic, MOTU Digital Performer, Cakewalk Sonar, Sony Vegas and more...
  
• Included - 6-Pin FireWire 400 Cable
  
• IEC Power Cable
  
• Rack mounting screws
  
• Warranty - Full 3 Years
  
• 1 Year Overnight Advance Replace on GT Key drives
  
• 2 Years Free Basic Data Recovery