Add 8 External eSATA Ports to Power Mac

S onnet Technologies announced Tuesday Tempo-X eSATA 8, a PCI card that brings eight external eSATA ports to your Power Mac. eSATA is a Serial ATA port that can be used externally, as well as internally, offering greater storage potential for Appleis Power Macs, especially the Power Mac G5, which have few internal expansion bays.

The Tempo-X eSATA 8 uses the fast PCI-X bus used in the Power Mac G5, and is also compatible with standard PCI slots on older Power Macs.

Each of the eight ports found on the card is independently capable of data transfer rates of up to 150MB/s, and the company said that much higher transfer rates may be achieved when connected drives are grouped in a RAID array using Appleis Disk Utility to form a RAID 0 array (RAID 0 is the striped RAID setup, which offers faster performance).


Tempo-X eSATA 8

Tempo-X eSATA 8 Key Features:

  • 8 external eSATA ports to support up to 4+TB of storage
  • 64-bit, 133MHz PCI-X Serial ATA host controller
  • Works in any PCI-X or PCI slot in the listed compatible computers
  • 48-bit LBA support for drives with a capacity larger than 137 GB
  • No drivers to install; plug and play installation
  • Supports Mac OS Xis built-in RAID 0 (striping) and RAID 1 (mirroring) functions
  • Upgradable firmware to enable future enhancements

Compatibility

  • Mac OS Compatible with Mac OS X Version 10.2 and higher

Macintosh models:

  • Power Macintosh G3 Blue & White
  • Power Mac G4 (all models except Cube)
  • Power Mac G5

The product is available immediately, and is priced at US$299.95. You can find more information about the card at Sonnetis Web site.