The Ciprico MediaVault 4440 is, simply, simple.

The rack, which has brushed aluminum sides and looped handles on top, is clearly intended to emulate and match the aesthetics of a Mac G5 computer. This expandable system features slots that accept up to four vPODs from the Ciprico MediaVault system.

The vPOD, the heart of the MediaVault system, consists of ten 160 GB hard drives engineered for laptop systems. Ciprico says it uses laptop hard drives instead of standard hard drives because they’re tougher and less prone to damage from shock and vibration. The ten hard drives in each vPOD give you an array for reaching blazing speeds with stellar stability.

When filled to capacity, the MediaVault enclosure holds 40 2.5-inch hard drives. You access them either as individual groups of 10, or as a single RAID consisting of the 40 drives. The best part is that you decide how you want to do this. Depending on the machine connected to the system, you can use up to four separate channels via Fibre Channel. (You access a single array only by striping the four 4 Gb Fibre Channel LUNs together, so I wouldn’t call it "user-selectable.")

The review unit sent to us included an ATTO Celerity Series four-channel card. Although the host adapter in your computer should be ready for 4 Gb Fibre Channel, you may use a 2 Gb Fibre Channel host adapter, though the performance will be limited to 2 Gb speeds. In my dual AMD machine, I had to use the 2 Gb Fibre Channel host adapter. I don’t think I was missing much, given that I was testing the MediaVault 4440 with XDCAM HD and HDCAM media (4:2:0 MPEG-2, 35 Mbps/3:1:1 uncompressed). If you’ll be working with 4:4:4 10-bit uncompressed, you’ll want a processing system with 4 Gb host capability.

Because the MediaVault RAID system is controlled by your computer system, you have the option of choosing several configurations. RAID 6 Turbo is recommended for those who don’t back up their media daily.

Selecting the RAID mode is a task for toothpicks (or other similar-sized objects), which you’ll need in order to push the small button selector on the back of the vPOD. You can address the vPODs via individual channels or as daisy-chained devices. You can reach optimal speed by using separate channels or "data pipes" to access each vPOD unit.

The real question, of course, is performance. The MediaVault doesn’t cut any corners there. Designed to play back a single stream of 4K uncompressed media, the storage system is capable of playing back multiple 1080i HDCAM streams and XDCAM streams (both are 1080i formats). I tested the unit using both Sony Vegas 7 and Avid Xpress HD, and was very pleased with its performance under both applications.

This system, with its near-bulletproof storage, can be used from ingest to print. It can also be a huge timesaver. The MediaVault isn’t cheap, but at the end of the day, if you want the toughest, fastest, biggest (yet portable), safest storage system available, the MediaVault 4440 is an ideal choice.