AutoMAID^® Energy Saving Technology

Nexsan's evolutionary AutoMAID (Automatic Massive Array of Idle Disks) energy saving technology transparently places disk drives into an idle state to vastly reduce power and cooling costs. AutoMAID delivers the cost-effecdtive benefits of MAID 2.0 without the limitations of slow access times and special host software.

AutoMAID is granular to an individual drive or RAID set and offers multiple levels of energy savings. AutoMAID is user selectable enabling users to determine the right level of response time performance to energy savings. AutoMAID is the first MAID 2.0 architecture that supports VTL, full file format D2D and standard high performance RAID implementations.

• » Learn more about MAID 2.0; download the StorageIO group's new white paper

Key Points

• AutoMAID reduces power and cooling costs
• Nexsan’s AutoMAID delivers the benefits of MAID without the limitations
• Available on Nexsan Assureon, SATABoy, SATABeast, and SATABeast Xi

AutoMAID Defined

• AutoMAID automatically reduces power consumption and heat generation on idle drives
• Trade-off between response times and power savings are user configurable
• AutoMAID behavior happens automatically and transparently to host – no software changes required
• Typical configuration settings:
  • Level 1: Heads Unloaded
    • 15% to 20% savings
    • Sub-second recovery time
  • Level 2: Heads Unloaded, slows to 4000 RPM
    • 35% to 45% savings
    • 15 second recovery time
  • Level 3: Stops spinning (sleep mode; powered on)
    • 60% to 70% savings
    • 30 to 45 second recovery time

AutoMAID Safety Features

• In maximum power saving mode, drive spin up is sequenced to reduce power surges
• Drives automatically wake up for periodic surface scan to ensure data integrity (user configurable)
• AutoMAID has no impact on performance if left on in data-intensive server applications
• Only two simple configuration settings – "timeout" and "power savings desired"