Specifications

of 115 MiB/s. This exceeds the highest rate required, which is 112 MiB/s (corresponding to TBN

mode at it’s largest speciﬁed bandwidth). Tests have veriﬁed the ability to record data streams at

115 MiB/s for a period of at least ten hours. The absolute ceiling on recording speed has not been

established, but may be in the neighborhood of 150 MiB/s on average, or 200 MiB/s with optimal

circumstances such as short recordings at the very beginning of the drive.

The MCS-DR PC is able to listen for and respond to a set of message types from MCS. The

message types which are currently implemented allow for initiation of recording, data veriﬁcation,

and other development and testing functions. It is anticipated that some of these commands will

become part of an MCS-DR ICD. Ultimately, each MCS-DR PC will have “subsystem status”, be

fully compliant with the MCS Common ICD, and be regarded by MCS in exactly the same way as

the other major LWA station subsystems (e.g.: SHL, ASP, DP, and so on).

2 Design Overview

The following sections describe in greater detail the hardware and software components of the MCS-

DR PC design, as well as the tests and methods used to verify diﬀerent aspects of the design. The

ﬁrst section presents a brief overview of the hardware and software comp onents and subsequent

sections discuss factors that played a role in hardware selection and software organization.

2.1 Hardware Brief

Figure 1 outlines the hardware organization for an individual MCS-DR PC. Each MCS-DR PC is

comprised of a stock Dell PC with two add-in cards and an external RAID enclosure. The stock

PC is a Dell Studio XPS

model 435MT computer. The Studio XPS

435MT is based on the

Intel

⃝

Core

i7-940 processor which has four Hyper-threaded

cores operating at 2.93 GHz. At

the time of purchase, the system was customized to have 6 GiB of Tri-Channel DDR3 SDRAM

memory operating at 1066 MHz. The system HDD is a Seagate 1 TB 7200 RPM SATA-II hard

disk drive with 16 MiB of cache memory. The Studio XPS

435MT also includes an onboard Intel

gigabit Ethernet (GBE) adapter which is used for communication with the station MCS.

For storage, an American Media Systems

⃝

Venus-T5

eSATA RAID external enclosure is

connected to the system via the eSATA cable supplied with the enclosure. The Studio XPS

435MT

system has an built-in eSATA port, but this was unsuitable for the needs of the MCS-DR PC (see

discussion in Section 2.3 later this document), and an eSATA adapter was used instead. A Silicon