Okay, so the Storinator storage pod is essentially a bunch of hard drives or SSD’s, if you see in our Stornado, attached to a motherboard, and how do you attach all these drives to a motherboard and get all this wonderful speed that we offer? Well, there's numerous different ways to do it in the field, other vendors use backplanes, SAS expanders; there's a couple ways to solve this problem, but what we do is we employ a direct-wired architecture, meaning that we have a one-to-one connection for the drive to the system and you get the full throughput out of your server.

Okay, so I'll start with where the drives connect. So we use a card called the LSI 9305, now we do have other options for custom things but our standard is the LSI 9305. And this connector has four ports on it, which each four ports can map to four SATA hard drives, or SAS, but traditionally SATA is what we use in our boxes. So, from that LSI card, we have our own cable that we make custom of us, not in any electrical way (just in its molding and how we fit it into our box), and it connects on one end to the other side card through an SFF 8643 and fans out to four SATA connectors, this way we have 4 drives per port. Due to the way we wire our machines we have 15 drives per row attached to one card, this gives us the amazingly high bandwidth that you've come to expect out of our Storinator products.

Little fun fact, you might have noticed I mentioned earlier that we do offer other cards in our machine but we do specialize on the 9305, the LSI 9305, as in its a JBOD card, it's built perfectly for software RAID and other fun software-to-find solutions like that, but a lot of people wonder what does JBOD mean-they think it's some fancy high-tech term, really it's just a bunch of disks, that's all it is, it surprises people every time.

So if you want to know more about our direct-wired nature, we did author a blog a bit of time ago about our transition away from back-playing units to direct-wire, you can check that out as well. If you really want to get a sense of how fast these things are and why the direct-wired nature is great, why don't you just pick one of these puppies up.

Thanks for tuning in, hope you enjoyed it. It was a little insightful, you learned a little more about what goes on behind the scenes with our service here and can't wait to see you to tune back in next week.