A pair of Serial ATA products from FirmTek—an adapter and a hot-swappable external enclosure—are making their debuts at Macworld Expo this week.
The SeriTek/1SM2 is a Type II 32-bit CardBus host adapter with 1.5Gbps storage transfer performance, designed for laptops. It lets users hot-swap hard drives—including drives which are configured as part of a RAID array—without having to turn off the notebook.
The SeriTek/1SM2 supports two 3.5-inch SATA hard disk drives, operating system and software-based RAID or JBOD configurations, and is compatible with FirmTek’s full line of hard drive enclosures. Designed as a native Serial ATA solution, it has no Parallel ATA/USB/Firewire to Serial ATA bridge chips. It’s compatible with G4-based Mac and PC notebooks with PC Card 32-bit CardBus Type II slots, and Mac OS 9, Mac OS X, Windows and Linux. The company’s estimated price is $89.95, with the SeriTek/1SM2 becoming available sometime before the end of March.
The SeriTek/2EN2 provides two hot swappable Serial ATA hard drive bays for Mac and Windows computers. It has user-selectable fan speeds which can be changed based on various working environments—such as in an edit suite or recording studio, for example.
FirmTek’s SeriTek/2EN2 two-bay Serial ATA enclosure will be available during this first quarter of this year for $199.95. Specially priced bundles with host adapters will also be available.