Sonnet Technologies has upgrade its Tempo-X eSATA controller cards with support for 3 Gigabit Serial ATA (SATA) II drives. The cards can also now be used in Windows XP-based systems; up to now, they were available for the Mac only.
Sonnet makes a Tempo-X eSATA 4+4 card with four internal and four external ports, for US$199.95. The $299.95 eSATA 8 card is coming in September and will feature eight external ports. The cards can use the Mac’s PCI-X interface when available; they’re also downwardly compatible with standard PCI slots. The cards support SATA I and SATA II drives, and feature 48-bit LBA support for drives with capacities larger than 137GB.
Sonnet said the eSATA host controllers are well-suited for users who demand high performance data transfer from their storage devices — in particular, eSATA is well-suited for High Definition (HD) video editing and authoring; you can group attached drives in RAID Level 0, 1 and 10 configurations to provide sustained transfer speeds in excess of 545MB/sec — more than enough to manage 10-bit uncompressed HD video capture, for example. The cards support hot-swappable drives and feature upgradeable firmware.
The eSATA controllers are compatible with Power Mac G3 Blue & White systems, G4s (except for the Cube) and G5 systems.