EtherDrive

EtherDrive is a brand name for storage area network devices based upon the ATA over Ethernet (AoE) protocol.

The first commercial transaction involving interstate commerce of an EtherDrive branded product was to Geoff Collyer.

These boards were attached like a daughterboard to PATA disk drives mounted and connected to a backplane that provided only power and an RJ-45 jack.

Combined with SSD disks the technology is an easy solution to data acquisition in the embedded space.

In May 2015, The Brantley Coile Company acquired the trademark and the IP and is now marketing the ATA over Ethernet storage appliance software based on the SRX and VSX products.

Figure 1. Early EtherDrives:
(Top) 2.5 PATA Blade
(Bottom) 3.5 PATA Blade
Figure 2. SR EtherDrive Cluster
These 60 Units can hold over 780 TeraBytes at RAID5 with 60 hot spares.