Many existing external hard drives use USB and/or 1394. These interfaces are not nearly as fast as SATA when compared using peak values, and can compromise drive performance. Initially SATA was designed as an internal or inside-the-box interface technology, bringing improved performance and new features to internal PC or consumer storage. Creative designers quickly realized the innovative interface could reliably be expanded outside the PC, bringing the same performance and features to external storage needs instead of relying on USB or 1394 interfaces.
PCI-e x4 (x8 and x16) slot compatible
4 External eSATA II ports at 3Gb/s per port
Up to 4 SATA II or SATA I Hard Drives
Support RAID 0, 1, 5, 10, and JBOD
Compatible with eSATA enclosures
Native Command Queuing (NCQ) for improved random performance
Online Capacity Expansion (OCE) and Online RAID Level Migration (ORLM)
Staggered drive spin up
BIOS Booting (INT13) to RAID array
Quick and Background initialization for instant RAID access
Write through and write back cache for RAID arrays
Hot swap and hot spare
Online array roaming
Automatic detect drive to rebuild degraded RAID
S.M.A.R.T array monitoring for hard drive status and reliability
64bit LBA for RAID arrays greater than 2TB
Web browser-base software (Web GUI)
Command Line Interface (CLI)
SMTP email notification for events and error reporting
Remote array mangement through (Web GUI, RAID GUI and CLI)
Support Windows (XP, 2000, Server 2003, x64 Edition and Vista), Linux, FreeBSD and Mac OS X
