Transmission of the data at these high rates is only one of the difficulties encountered in today’s modern military systems. Another area of concern is the archival of the data for subsequent review and analysis, either at the same site or in another facility. Today’s data acquisition applications, with multiple sensors generating data at rates exceeding 200 megabytes per second during missions lasting for hours, require a special class of archival system.

Current drive technologies have sustained throughputs between 50 and 100 MB/sec. A single recording drive media would be overwhelmed by a single stream of S-FPDP 247 megabytes per second data. To improve the drive throughput, multiple drives are typically combined in parallel fashion and the data is striped onto the drives. This approach enables the relatively slow drive media to keep up with the high data rates from the sensors.

Today’s recording systems provide the capability to store multiple terabytes of data at rates of 200-plus megabytes per second per channel. They also provide several methods of retrieving the data in real time or for post-run analysis. Some of the retrieval methods available include physical drive removal, data dumping using multiple 4 GB/second Fibre Channel connections, and Gigabit Ethernet. The selection of the method is determined by the amount of data to be retrieved and the time available for the retrieval.

This work was done by Dr. Ralph Barrera of Curtiss-Wright Controls Embedded Computing. Contact Dr. Barrera at 937-252-5601 x1240, or visit here.