Hard Drive Storage Unit Supports Mix of 2.5" and 3.5" Drives

Addonics Technologies announced Wednesday a hard drive storage solution called Mini Storage Tower that can house both 3.5" and 2.5" SATA or IDE hard drives. The tower can support up to four hard drives of each size, is hot swappable, comes in white or black, and has what Addonics calls a low-noise cooling fan.

The product can be configured with one of four different back panels for (Addonicsi descriptions):

  • Multilane bridge (MSTS4AML) – for connecting up to four SATA/SATA II hard drives to system via one 1.5 Meter long Infiniband Multilane cable. Multilane supports Windows, Linux or Mac OS. It is ideal for applications that require bandwidth, greater fault tolerance, and easy scalability because it is capable of transferring four independent SATA devices at speeds up to 3.0Gbps per channel.
  • SATA Port Multiplier (MST5X1PM) -- for connecting up to four SATA/SATA II hard drives to the computer via a single eSATA port.
  • JBOD USB (MST4IDEU2) -- to connect up to four IDE hard drives as one large combined drive, two combined drives, or four individual drives to computer via 1 USB 2.0/1.1 port.
  • Four Individual eSATA ports (MST4ESA) -- for connecting four hard drives to the enclosure via four individual eSATA cables.

Users can mix and match both SATA and IDE drives in both 2.5" and 3.5" sizes within a single tower. Use of 2.5" drives, however, requires either converter brackets or a special rack that are available as options. Pricing on the Mini Storage Tower ranges from US$119 to $195.