(EMAILWIRE.COM, December 19, 2000 ) ATLANTA -- American Megatrends Inc. (AMI), the leader in storage and computing innovations worldwide, today announced support for Red Hat Linux®, RAID 10 and multi-controllers to its MegaRAID® IDE100 and MegaRAID IDE66 hard drive accelerators. The controllers were recently renamed to join AMI's extensive MegaRAID family. AMI developed the low-cost MegaRAID IDE100 to meet the demand for more power and performance, more storage capacity and increased manageability required in PC, workstation and entry-level sever markets. The PCI expansion card offers advanced RAID capabilities to meet the performance requirements of the desktop publishing/graphic workstation entrepreneur and the reliability requirements of the small office/small business server."AMI's added support for Red Hat Linux 6.1 and 6.2, RAID 10 (mirroring striping) and multi-controllers enables users to operate the MegaRAID IDE100 in more operating environments and provides users with more storage space and balance between performance and reliability," said Tracy Yang, AMI IDE RAID program manager. "These new features, along with its easy-to-use set up application and advanced management utilities, position AMI to become the industry leading IDE RAID controller manufacturer on the market today."Red Hat Linux 6.1/6.2:With the newly released Linux driver, the MegaRAID IDE100 controller offers RAID 1 and RAID 0 capabilities within Red Hat Linux environments. The driver works with kernel versions 2.2.16 and operates as a block device driver. AMI will support all future Linux kernel versions. The driver also supports mirror rebuilding, error logging, event monitoring and multiple controllers in a single system. AMI's Linux offering consists of the block device driver, a daemon and a console application. Red Hat Linux drivers are available on the AMI web site: www.ami.com. AMI plans to support other Linux distributions in the near future.RAID 10: The MegaRAID IDE100 will offer support for RAID 10, a combination of RAID 1 (mirroring) and RAID 0 (striping) that allows balance between performance and reliability. Two sets of drives are first mirrored with RAID level 1. The resulting two RAID 1s are then striped as a RAID 0. Using this configuration, performance is increased via the RAID 0, while the RAID 1s provide data security. Multi-Controller: With multi-controller support, up to two IDE RAID controllers can be used in one system under Windows and up to four controllers can be used under Linux. This allows users to connect up to eight ATA/100 hard drives, boosting storage capacity for server and workstation environments. Easy Setup and Management:The controller's easy setup is enhanced with a new ROM setup utility that provides a more user-friendly interface with a color-coded display that immediately informs the user about the status of the array. Its ROM setup utility also enables users to migrate an existing drive to a RAID 1 array with addition of a new drive and supports the rebuilding of broken mirrors.The IDE RAID controller comes with SMART support, which enhances hard drive manageability and detects drive failures and issues warnings before a drive fails. Other utility features for enhanced array performance include a background program to monitor array health and errors, automatic and user-driven array rebuilding utilities as well as DMI and SNMP agents. The Manufacturer's Suggested Retail Price (MSRP) for the MegaRAID IDE100 controller is $109 and it is currently shipping with these new features.About AMIFounded in 1985, American Megatrends Inc. (AMI) has dedicated its resources to providing OEMs, resellers and systems integrators with leading edge computer technologies. This privately held company, best known for its Basic Input/Output Systems or BIOS, also supplies its state-of-the-art hardware, software, utilities and RAID controllers to over 55 percent of today's high-tech manufacturers. Headquartered in Atlanta, AMI has locations in the U.S. and throughout the world including London, Madras, Munich, Seoul, Taipei and Tokyo to better serve our customers. For more information on AMI, its products, services or reseller opportunities, call 1-800-U-BUY-AMI orvisit www.ami.com.MegaRAID is a registered trademark of American Megatrends Inc. All other trademarks belong to their respective companies.

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