Designed to the latest 3Gbits/sec ASIC from Silicon Image and eSATA connector, this 4-port controller incorporates many advanced features that are only found in some expensive RAID controllers. With the onboard RAID firmware, the 4 eSATA ports can be easily configured as 4 individual ports with no RAID or with RAID 5, RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 10, RAID 1+S, or JBOD (a feature of combining all 4 drives into one large capacity hard drive)
When installed into the fast PCI-X BUS, this controller ensures maximum data throughput of 3 Gbits/sec per port. In addition, the latest External SATA (eSATA) connector also provides more secured cable connection, improved durability, increased EMI protection and 2 meters in cable length. (For more detail on this new SATA external connector, please review the following white paper posted on SATA-IO.org)
Throughput up to 200 Mbytes/sec sustained data transfer can be achieved using standard 7,000 RPM SATA hard drive by setting up 4 drives in a RAID 0 configuration. Together with the Addonics optional Disk Array 5SA system, Saturn Hard Drive kit or the external SATA drive enclosure, you can add external high performance storage system that rivals the traditional SCSI storage at less than half of the cost.
For more information on Serial ATA, please visit our tutorial page.
*Note: It is common in RAID5 configuration that the WRITE speed performs slower than READ. Depending on system hardware, the WRITE performance can to 25% of the READ speed. This performance difference does not affect general database application where majority of the transations are READ commands. For applications that require large files transfer or continuous writing of data on the the hard drive such as video editing, RAID5 configuration may not be desirable.
* Hot swapping hard drive has been tested on Windows OS only. When drives are configured as RAID 0 and certain RAID combination, the removal of the hard drive will result in breaking the RAID set and result in data loss.
Winbench 99 test result comparison between one drive and 4 drives striped over 4 ports
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BUS type
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PCI-X BUS
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PCI BUS
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||
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Drive configuration
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Single drive
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Stripe 4 Drives
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Single Drive
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Stripe 4 drive
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Disk Transfer Rate (MBytes/sec)
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58
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204
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58
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123
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SATA data transfer rate is calculated at 10 bits=1 byte
System Requirement
