Addonics launches SATA II PCI-X Controller with 4 eSATA Ports, RAID 5 and JBOD

Addonics today announced a 4-port eSATA controller capable of connecting four external hard drives
with RAID Level 5 or JBOD support through the high-speed PCI-X bus.

The new Addonics eSATA II RAID5/JBOD controller (ADS3GX4R5-E) ensures maximum data throughput of 3 Gbits/sec per port when installed into the PCI-X bus. The controller features the latest eSATA connector to provide EMI protection, improved durability, and a complete cabling solution to ensure SATA signal integrity in external applications up to seven feet.

Throughput of up to 200 Mbytes/sec sustained data transfer can be achieved using standard 7,000 RPM SATA hard drives by setting up four drives in a RAID 0 configuration. The controller can also be combined with several optional Addonics Drive Enclosure solutions including the Disk Array 4SA system, Saturn Hard Drive kit or the external SATA drive enclosure. These solutions would allow users to build an external storage system that achieves similar performance of traditional SCSI storage, perfect for NAS, SAN, RAID and non-RAID storage arrays at less than half the cost.
With the onboard RAID firmware, the four eSATA ports can be easily configured as four individual ports with RAID 5, RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 10, RAID 1+S, or with no RAID as JBOD (a feature, which combines all four drives into one large capacity hard drive)

The Addonics controller is compatible with all SATA hard drives. The controller also has hot swap capability to allow drives to be removed or added without a system shut down or restart.

The controller supports the fast 133 MHz 64bit PCI-X bus architecture with maximum data throughput of 3 Gbits/sec per port. PCI-X bus is also backward compatible with the standard PCI bus architecture at both the device and driver level.

The Addonics eSATA II RAID5/JBOD controller is compatible with DOS, Windows 95, NT, 98SE, Me, 2000 and XP. Linux support includes 64-bit Linux RAID Driver for Redhat Fedora Core2 (rev.10037) for AMD64 and EMT64 platforms-Beta, and 64-bit SuSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 9.0RAID Driver (rev.10037) for AMD64 and EMT64 platforms-Beta.

The controller (Model: ADS3GX4R5-E)) has a MSRP of $129