First up is RAID-3 itself, a number that has some really nice uses, but is rarely used. Three consists of two drives with the data striped on them, and a separate parity drive. Similar to RAID-5, if you lose a drive, it keeps on going, but it still gives you the speed of a striped set. The cost is a little space left underutilized on the parity drive.

The difference is that with RAID 3, and a bit of tweaked firmware, you can skip that annoying pause when the card is trying to figure out that a drive is indeed dead. If you are thinking that it is not worth it to do over good old-fashioned RAID-5, you are right, unless you are doing video. Video doesn't like seven second pauses while a controller tries to figure out if the drive just decided life was no longer worth living, nor the performance degradation of a limping RAID-5 set. RAID-3 is your RAID level of choice here.

The chips that actually do the work is part of the SyncRAID line, with two new chips about to launch The NC3000 and NC5000 are both 32 and 64-bit PCI compatible, and should be out in Q4. In fact XFX, (link:http://www.xfxforce.com/index-interim.php) yes the video card maker, will have two cards out in that time frame. The 3 port one will retail for $179.99 and the five port for $249.99.

One other thing it was showing was the feature that allow the chips to do more than PCI, they will also do USB2 and 1394A/B. External RAID anyone? If that didn't catch your attention, think about this. With a five drive external RAID box, you can pretty much saturate a firewire connection using cheap drives.

Software RAID a few of these, and you have enough bandwidth to play with uncompressed HD video, along with the storage space to keep it. All that in a neat, and not all that expensive, chassis.

To be honest, I wasn't expecting the Netcell stuff to be all that interesting. If someone from Seagate hadn't dragged me over and said 'this is neat, check it out', I probably would not have given it much thought. As it was, I am really glad I did, it looks to be an inexpensive alternative to RAID-5 solutions. µ