AutoMAID™ Energy Saving Tech

SATABoy with AutoMAID™ Energy Saving Technology

SATABoy employs Nexsan's revolutionary AutoMAID™ energy saving technology. AutoMAID™ transparently places SATABoy disk drives into an idle state vastly reducing power consumption and operational costs. AutoMAID delivers the cost-saving benefits of MAID (Massive Array of Idle Disks) but without the limitations of slow access times and special host software. Nexsan's AutoMAID is granular to an individual drive or RAID set and offers multiple levels of energy savings enabling users to determine the right level of access speed and energy savings for their environment. AutoMAID is the first MAID architecture that supports VTL (Virtual Tape Libraries), full file format D2D and standard high performance RAID implementations.

By integrating Nexsan's AutoMAID™ technology into their high performance, multipurpose SATA storage arrays, users now have the flexibility to support multiple applications within the same storage subsystem. AutoMAID is user-selectable allowing this feature to be implemented as desired. AutoMAID can be applied selectively by drive units and can be disabled for volumes requiring the very best response time.

Key Points

  • SATABoy with AutoMAID can cool all drives at 100% activity (even with one or two fans failed, even in a hot room) 

  • MAID reduces operational costs 

  • Nexsan’s AutoMAID gains the benefits of MAID without the limitations 

  • Available on Nexsan SATABoy, SATABlade and SATABeast

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 

  • AutoMAID is analogous to power saving modes on laptops 

  • Typical configuration settings:

    • 30% savings – after 5 minutes of idle time, drives are programmed to unload heads and slow down to 4000 RPM.  Very fast recovery time.

    • 52% savings – after 5 minutes of idle time, drives are programmed to spin down.

    • Recovery time