You can connect almost any 2.5” SATA disk. We recommend Angelbird Crest (Expansion Cartridge or SSD), but also most 3rd party drives will work.

Wings is designed for SSD drives, but you can also use regular hard disk drives. However, you will not get the optimal speed Wings when using regular hard disk drives.

Wings is a storage controller. It allows you to access your files very very fast.

This means programs start faster, projects load faster, files copy faster, games load faster; anything needing high speed data access will be faster.

Wings can be used by anyone who works with big files, or many small files.

For example Audio and Video professionals can work with their projects much faster.

Also gamers will benefit from wings. It reduces the loading time of games and will help provide smoother gameplay. No more lag when entering a new area.

Wings also delivers great benefits when employed in servers, improving access times and transfer speeds.

Wings supports most popular and modern Operating Systems, therefore you can easily manage a multi-OS machine with Wings and use the on-board storage to host a graphical boot loader.

If you have your sample library on Wings, loading times become very short. There will be hardly any latency. For example, if you have a audio project with a lot of regions and software instruments which carry thousands of samples, you will experience smooth playback, no crackles and very short loading times. This is a big difference with normal hard disks, where loading time is much longer.

When using Wings in combination with Crest SSD drives, thanks to the SSD technology, you won’t hear any background noise from the drives, which you would have with traditional hard drives.

When using Wings with your chosen DAW setup, you will be able to use a vastly increased number of plugins before noticing a slowdown of your machine, and any glitches or drops in Audio.

When bouncing/rendering files you will benefit from faster offline file completion speeds.

Video professionals work with very big files. By using wings loading these files will be a matter of seconds instead of minutes.

For example if you load a file of 4.3 Gigabytes (size of a rendered DVD) it will take little more than 5 seconds.

You can speed up your server using wings.

For example, you can put your database files on Wings and get many more IOPS.

For a file server or web server you could use Wings to store the caches and swap files to greatly increase responsiveness.

RAID stands for "Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks", which means that multiple disks are combined as one virtual disk.

The computer sees only the virtual disk, called a RAID Set. There are a number of RAID "levels" which define how the storage media are combined. For Wings, RAID levels 0, 1 and 1+0 are recommended. To learn more about RAID, please refer to wikipedia.

Warning: RAID is not an alternative for backups!

In a RAID 0 Set, all disks share the workload. A RAID 0 Set is also called a Striped RAID Set.

For example, with a RAID 0 Set of four Crest Expansion Cartridges on a Wings, each disks does 25% of the work. Each disk in the Set will get 25% of the data.

Combining the disks like this allows Wings to add the speeds of each disk together. The Striped RAID Set of the example reaches read speeds of 800MB/s and write speeds of 750MB/s. The drawback is that if one disk breaks, all data is lost.

Make sure a proper backup system is in place!

In a RAID 1 Set, all disks have an identical copy of all data. A RAID 1 Set is also called a Mirrored RAID Set.

For example, with a RAID 1 Set of two Crest Expansion Cartridges on a Wings, each disk has a copy of all files.

Combining the disks like this allows the computer to keep working even when a single disk breaks. At least one working disks is needed to allow the computer to keep working.

Depending on the operating system, read speeds also improve like RAID 0. The drawback is that the write speed will not improve over using a single disk.

A RAID 1+0 Set is the result of combing RAID 1 Sets into a RAID 0 Set. A RAID 1+0 Set is also called a RAID 10 Set.

For example, with four Crest Expansion Cartridges on a Wings, a RAID 1+0 Set is made by making two RAID 1 Sets of two Crest each. Then these two RAID 1 Sets are combined into a RAID 0 Set.

Combining the disks like this gives a good tradeoff between speed and reliability. In the example, two disks can break without stopping the computer from working. The speed will be roughly half of that of the RAID 0 Set with four Crest.

If your computer breaks, you can use the USB port to connect Wings to another computer and still access the files on the on-board drive. Remember to disconnect your Wings card from your computer when using the USB port. The USB port won't allow you to recover data on the drives attached to Wings, only from the on-board storage.

Wings is supported on Apple® OSX and Microsoft® Windows™ Vista and later. Although officially unsupported, Wings also works with Windows XP, and out of the box with Linux and FreeBSD.

See the answer to the question "What is the power cable used for?".

No. A power cable is included with every Wings.

Yes. Installing the hardware is very easy, it's plug and play. You also need to install a software driver. The manual contains detailed instructions for both PC and MAC.

There are 3 versions. There is Wings Lite, which has no on-board drive. And there is Wings with either a 3GB or 16GB on-board drive.

You can use it for many things. Below are some examples.

• If you have Windows and Mac OS X installed on your computer, you can use this on-board storage to make a volume or partition to exchange files between them.
• When using multiple Operating Systems on a machine, you can also install a graphical bootloader on the on-board drive.
• You could use it just as an additional drive to store files and benefit of the reliability of Solid State Storage technology.

Yes, regular (mechanical) 2.5" SATA Hard Disk Drives can be connected.

To be able to connect them, you need a set of 3rd Party Drive Bolts. You also need to connect the power cable. Detailed instructions are provided in the manual.

No, this is not possible.

When using two or more drives on Wings, or you use one ore more regular HDD, the power cable needs to be attached to this connector. This will provide Wings with enough power.

Warning: No connecting the power cable may result in hardware damage.

A power cable is included with every Wings.

Wings depends on the software RAID drivers implemented in the operating system of the computer. This means that for each operating system different RAID levels are supported. In the table below, SPAN mean a concatenated disk set. It is also called Linear RAID, and often wrongly called JBOD. Nesting means that a RAID volume can be used in another RAID volume. This allows one to create 0+1, 1+5, etc. For more information on the different RAID levels, please look here.

You can decide this, since it depends on the drives you attach to Wings.

When you use 4 Crest drives of 240 GB per drive, you can get a maximum size of 960GB. At this moment the biggest 2.5” hard disk drives have 1 TB of storage. This means that if you use 4 of them on Wings, you get a maximum size of 4TB. Of course this is not as fast as using SSD drives.

The only limitation is the amount of available number of PCIe x4, x8 or x16 slots on your motherboard.

Wings is the only storage controller of its kind. It is the only controller where you can attach either 2.5” Solid State Drives and SATA Hard Disk Drives of your choice. This means that when you need more speed, you can add an extra drive to make it even faster.

For example, if you have 2 drives attached to Wings, and you add another 2 drives, you not only double your storage capacity but also your speed.

Wings is the only storage controller on the market that can boot on a Mac Pro. This means you can install Mac OS X on a drive attached to Wings (or on the on-board drive) and you can boot from it.