Test Center Daily | InfoWorld Staff » Micronet ships portable eSATA box

June 05, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Micronet ships portable eSATA box

TAGS: Small arrays

Micronet ships portable eSATA box

eSATA may not be the first protocol that comes to mind for direct attached drives, but this clever extension of the SATA (serial ATA) technology offers affordable and fast connectivity that leaves in the dust competing solutions based on USB and FireWire.

Probably the best Web spot for a refresher on eSATA is the influential SATA-IO where you can also find diagrams and benchmarks that help positioning this technology and its products.

The latest addition to this interesting line of products for SMB comes from Micronet, with the eSATA version of the Platinum RAID Pro array that offers the most common RAID levels for its 5 SATA 2 drives, a 128MB cache and capacity ranging between 2.5 TB and 5 TB.

According to Micronet the Platinum RAID Pro plays nice with recent Apple, Linux and Microsoft OSes but older versions may not be able to see capacity past 2TB.

Micronet Platinum RAID Pro
Availability: Shipping
Pricing: $2349 for a 2.5TB - $4499 for 5TB
Verdict: At a price of less that $1 per GB many small companies with large repositories will probably find that the Platinum RAID Pro is a more flexible and affordable backup alternative than most tape solutions. I don't like that RAID 6 is not supported but with that in mind the array can play well also as primary or second tier storage.

Posted by Mario Apicella on June 5, 2007 03:47 AM

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