FirmTek ships 4-port Serial ATA host adapters
updated 12:20 pm EDT, Mon April 18, 2005
FirmTek 4-port SATA cards
FirmTek today announced began shipping its newest Serial ATA host adapters: the four-port offers four external Serial ATA ports that are independently controlled, fully shielded and completely hot-swappable. This design allows for the quick connection of drives to virtually any PCI-based Mac for any number of applications; the hot-swap feature allows multiple users or applications to share the same machine without rebooting between projects. FirmTek says that even a fully operational RAID volume can be unmounted, disconnected, and replaced with another volume without powering the Macintosh down.
The SeriTek/1V4 utilizes internal connections for independent volumes or RAID arrays contained entirely inside the Power Mac enclosure. It offers the same performance without employing hot-swap functionality.
"With legacy G4 platforms, including most of the 'Sawtooth' varieties of Power Macintosh, both of these new SeriTek solutions are limited by bus speed rather than processor speed, which results in impressive performance now that the processor can be fully utilized. While the original Sawtooth machines will often outperform 130MB/sec throughput, the later Digital Audio, Quicksilver and MDD systems deliver RAID performance nearly equivalent to the latest G5 towers. Given these older systems' greater internal storage capacities, this will be important for many video professionals.'
FirmTek's SeriTek/1VE4 external Serial ATA host adapter is priced at $140, while the SeriTek/1V4 internal Serial ATA host adapter is priced at USD $120 (SATA-1V4). Specially priced bundles with external enclosures are also available.
