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April 21, 2006
Five Drive eSATA Port Multiplier Upgrade
Review: Using the Addonics 5X1 eSATA Port Multiplier (AD5SAPM-E)
Addonics is shipping the 5X1 eSATA Port Multiplier (PM) (AD5SAPM-E) for $85. This board enables up to five SATA hard drives to share a single port on a SATA host adapter with port multiplier capability. The Addonics 5X1 eSATA Port Multiplier is designed to be used internally in an Addonics Storage Tower or with many of the standard 2 bay or larger SCSI enclosures available on the market. The beauty of the port multiplier is that it enables an SATA host adapter to mount up to five hard drives on a single port.
During this review, an original Apple PowerMac G5 2.0GHz Dual with a Sonnet Tempo SATA X4P card installed and a PowerMac G5 2.5GHz Quad with a Sonnet Tempo SATA E4P card installed were used to evaluate the Addonics 5X1 eSATA port multiplier. This article will examine how the Addonics 5X1 eSATA port multiplier performs when used with an Apple PowerMac.
System Requirements
Works with any System your PM host adapter is compatible with.
Requires a SATA controller that has PM support.
Requires a SATA enclosure with space to mount a 5x1 board internally.
Requires Silicon Image firmware 1.0114 to work with Sonnet PM cards.
What is SATA PM?
A SATA port multiplier also known as "SATA PM" is a device that allows several SATA hard drives to use a single port on a host adapter. Port multipliers typically reside in an enclosure and are transparent to the drives. Port multipliers support all standard SATA hard drives. This allows SATA hard drive systems to accommodate many more hard drives than the direct connect method, which requires a single SATA host adapter port for each hard drive connected.
As you can see in the image above, up to five SATA hard drives can connect to the 5X1 port multiplier board. A single eSATA cable attaches the 5X1 PM board to a port on the SATA PM host adapter, which is mounted on a PCI, PCI-X or PCIe expansion slot inside the computer. Simplified cabling allows the host adapter to be connected to as many as five hard drives with a single cable. The host adapter has to be PM compatible for this system to work. Only a few Macintosh host adapters have this capability so far. When using a RAID0 setup, performance is usually not as fast as when using a direct connect system. However, when using SATA PM with "just a bunch of disks" SATA port multiplier hard drive performance is very good.
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Contact Information:Addonics Technologies
2466 Kruse Drive,
San Jose, CA 95131 USA
408-433-3899
addonics@addonics.com
http://www.addonics.com
Copyright 2006
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