FirmTek ships SATA PCI-X port multiplier

FirmTek today began shipping its SeriTek/2SE4 PCI-X adapter, a Serial ATA (SATA) controller card announced at the Macworld Expo in San Francisco earlier this year that provides connections for up to 20 hard drives. Each drive is capable of transferring at 3Gbps, making total aggregate speeds of more than 700MB/sec possible. FirmTek's established hot-swap compatibility eases the process of moving entire drives and arrays between any FirmTek-equipped systems or into secure storage. The SeriTek/2SE4 is compatible with both PCI-X and PCI bus architecture systems, offering optimal performance on PCI-X systems like Power Mac G5 desktops. FirmTek's SeriTek/2SE4 is available for $200, and requires Mac OS X 10.4 or later.

The controller offers full boot capability with RAID configurations that support system operations, and four hot-swappable external SATA II port enable individual drives or RAID arrays via RAID 0/1 software available for Mac and Windows systems. FirmTek's new technology provides for port multiplication, allowing each physical SATA port to access multiple devices at full speed and performance via port multiplier enclosures like the company's new SeriTek/5PM. Prior SATA standards required a separate cable for each physical drive connected, creating inconvenient tangles on the desktop.

The port multiplier technology in the SeriTek 2SE4 optimizes up to five drives per port by utilizing multiple lanes of the advanced PCI-Express bus architecture. When 20 high performance drives are configured in a RAID array, throughput can reach beyond 700MB/sec, enabling users to stream up to four simultaneous HD video sources directly to disk.

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