FirmTek Ships New 4-Port eSATA 6G Storage Adapter for Mac and Windows

[Cristian_25H]

FirmTek, LLC, a pioneer and leader in Serial ATA (SATA) storage solutions is announcing that the SeriTek/Q6G 4-Port eSATA host adapter is now available. The high performance SeriTek/Q6G is Mac OS X Bootable, whether installed inside the Apple Mac Pro or a Thunderbolt PCIe expansion chassis, with and without SATA port-multiplication.

Performance
"Dynamic growth in the availability of SATA 6G SSD and HDD storage devices has increased the need for ultra-high performance 6-Gigabit/sec eSATA controllers with sufficient bandwidth to maximize performance. The SeriTek/Q6G was developed to meet this need. With real world storage performance results in excess of 500 MB/s per channel, the SeriTek/Q6G offers a new level of performance for professional customers", said Chi Kim Stanford Vice President of Business Development. "The SeriTek/Q6G is ideal for audio/video editing, photography, large media content libraries, storage expansion, backup and any other application where external, hot swap, high performance, data storage is desirable."





Mac Pro or Thunderbolt
For connecting high-speed external SATA enclosures, the SeriTek/Q6G works equally well as a powerful storage adapter in either the Mac Pro desktop computer or with a Thunderbolt PCIe expansion chassis. Due to performance rivaling that of traditional tower computers, many professionals are now turning to notebooks as their primary platform for working with audio, video and photography. The Thunderbolt expansion chassis helps unlock the full performance and storage potential of Apple's latest systems such as the MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, Mac mini, and the iMac.

Configurations
The SeriTek/Q6G is built to support several types of eSATA enclosures. Direct connect enclosures like the miniSwap/ES, connect each drive to its own individual eSATA port. This configuration offers the ultimate in performance with the lowest number of drives. The SeriTek/Q6G also supports port multiplication enclosures like the SeriTek/5PM. The 5PM allows up to five SATA drives to be connected to a single port or up to 80 TB and twenty hard drives with four 5PM enclosures.

While the miniSwap/ES and the SeriTek/5PM can be used separately with the SeriTek/Q6G, one setup professional users deploy is the combination of ultra-fast SSD storage along with 5-bays of high capacity 3.5-inch SATA data storage provided by the SeriTek/5PM. This combination offers the best of both worlds. The four eSATA ports available on the SeriTek/Q6G allow both the miniSwap/ES and the SeriTek/5PM to be used concurrently. Use the SSD(s) in the miniSwap/ES for high-speed data manipulation and dump the final work to the 5PM for customer distribution and archival purposes. This combination offers the customer maximum transfer rates for data intensive operations while still supporting up to five removable 3.5-inch SATA drives for expanded storage capacity.

Key Features and Benefits
- Bootable: Supports Mac OS X 10.8.x "Mountain Lion", 10.7.x, 10.6.x
- Supports Windows 7
- Four high performance eSATA ports
- Compatible with multiple Thunderbolt PCIe expansion chassis
- PCI-Express Base 2.0 specification compliant: Supports 2.5 Gbps and 5.0 Gbps
- Supports SATA 6.0 Gb/s, 3.0 Gb/s and 1.5 Gb/s hard drives
- Fully compliant with Serial ATA revision 3.0 specifications
- S.M.A.R.T application support for third-party Macintosh utilities
- Supports Disk Utility RAID and JBOD configurations
- Supports up to 20 SATA hard drives using SeriTek/5PM and Mac OS X
- Supports up to 4 direct-connect SATA hard disks using two miniSwap/ES enclosures
- Complete CRC error checking for ensuring data integrity
- Provides hot swap and PM support not available with internal Mac Pro bays
- Bandwidth can exceed 700 MB/sec with a high-speed HDD/SSD configuration
- Low power consumption with aggressive power management
- User-upgradeable firmware
- Multiple SeriTek/Q6G controllers can be configured to support a single large RAID set

Pricing and Availability
The FirmTek SeriTek/Q6G 4-port eSATA controller for Apple Mac Pro and Windows 7 PC is available now with a retail price of $199.95 USD. The SeriTek/Q6G (SATA-Q6G) can be purchased from FirmTek distributors, resellers or directly from FirmTek. The SeriTek/Q6G is also available bundled with the SeriTek/5PM (SATA-Q6G-5PM) or the miniSwap/ES (SATA-Q6G-ES). For more information about the SeriTek/Q6G please visit FirmTek's website at http://www.firmtek.com/seritek/seritek-q6g/.

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[The Von Matrices]

So the card supports 2.4GBps of SATA data throughput, but it only has a 500MB/s conection to the PC? Does anyone else see a major bottleneck? And a retail price of $200?! I know that Apple parts are expensive but this is about four times what competitors charge for similar features.

 

[wrathchild_67]

So the card supports 2.4GBps of SATA data throughput, but it only has a 500MB/s conection to the PC? Does anyone else see a major bottleneck? And a retail price of $200?! I know that Apple parts are expensive but this is about four times what competitors charge for similar features.

Not even 500MB/s one way- it's 250MB/s duplexed. [Edit]Eh didn't see the second tab on that card. Still, it's extremely bandwidth limited if you plan to use more than one port.

 

[Maban]

Nice to see more two-lane PCIe cards coming out. Maybe Haswell will introduce us to the first x2 slot.

 

[Disparia]

Despite the red PCB, the Highpoint version is a lot more attractive at half the price. They are most likely using the same controller (Marvell 88SE9235: 4x6Gb/s, PCIe 2.0 x2).

Nice to see more two-lane PCIe cards coming out. Maybe Haswell will introduce us to the first x2 slot.

I can't recall the first chipset to support it, but many of the current ones already support x2 configurations.

 

[The Von Matrices]

I didn't realize it was PCIe 2.0 x2, which means 1GB/s (per direction) instead of the 500MB/s I stated earlier. Still, it isn't nearly enough bandwidth if two SSDs are connected let alone multiple hard drive enclosures which are stated as its suggested use.

 

[timta2]

When you have to have a team of developers write custom firmware, it's going to cost a little more. Someone has to pay for that and it's going to be you as the consumer. Traditionally, a device being "Mac Bootable" has a price. You can buy that other card for half the price, but it's not going to offer the same capabilities on a Mac Pro, as this card would. It's the same reason the Mac Radeon cards cost twice as much.

I've been impressed with the FirmTek (Sonnet) cards I've purchased in the past. I think I payed $75 rather than $50 for my old PCI SATA controller card so that I could boot from the drives attached to the card.

This also isn't an "Apple Part", it's an "Apple Compatible Part". There is a difference.