Addonics on Tuesday introduced its 5×1 eSATA Hardware Port Multiplier (HPM). The device enables up to five drives to be connected to any computer regardless of operating system using a single external Serial ATA (eSATA) interface. It costs $119 and is designed to be integrated into Addonics’ external eSATA drive enclosures.
eSATA is gaining traction as an external data storage peripheral interface — it works faster than FireWire 800 does, and is available to Power Mac, Mac Pro and MacBook Pro users who outfit their Macs with third-party expansion cards.
The 5×1 eSATA HPM is compatible with an SATA controller card and works with RAID and non-RAID storage systems alike. It fits into Addonics’ line of Storage Tower peripherals and also works with many standard two-bay or larger SCSI enclosures. Featuring five SATA connectors, it can be used to configure a new RAID system supporting RAID Levels 0, 1 or 10, or as a JBOD (Just a Bunch of Disks).
All devices remain hot-swappable, and the HPM itself works with Mac OS X, Windows, Linux and Solaris.
Addonics offers an optional $29.95 USB 2.0 to eSATA adapter cable that enables the device to communicate with a computer using a standard USB 2.0 interface instead.