Addonics Technologies today announced the 5-port HPM-XU, a feature-rich hardware port multiplier (HPM), which connects up to five SATA hard drives to high speed eSATA or the latest SuperSpeed USB 3.0 ports on any system via a single eSATA or USB cable. Addonics also unveiled a family of RAID storage solutions that integrate with its HPM. The new port multiplier comes with built-in RAID accelerator and supports sustained transfer exceeding 240 MB/sec with 5 drives in RAID 5 configuration.

The 5-port HPM-XU will benefit anyone wanting to attach numerous hard drives to desktops or servers as individual drives or as high performance RAID volumes with redundancy. You can also connect five SATA optical drives, such as DVD-RRW or Blu-ray drives, to your system and do simultaneous data copying. The device supports all current versions of Windows, Mac OS X and above, Linux kernel 2.4 and above, and Mac OS X 10.4.x.

The 5-Port HPM-XU fits perfectly inside the Addonics family of tower and rack storage products, plus many standard multi-bay enclosures with a standard SCSI-1 connector cut out.

RAID configuration can be set via onboard dip switches or the included Windows software utility. The drive and HPM status can be visually monitored by attaching LEDs to the onboard LED signal pin headers or via the bundled Windows monitoring software. Any drive failure or RAID error can be notified via audible alert from the on board buzzer and email to an SMTP account.

The Addonics RAID tower family includes the RAID Tower Mini (four 3.5-inch drives), RAID Tower III (five 3.5-inch drives), and RAID Tower IX (15 3.5-inch drives). Each tower allows users to create an external RAID solution simply by adding the hard drive of choice by directly inserting drive into the drive bay or via removable drive tray. The drives can be configured as a RAID set and be connected to the computer via USB 3.0, USB 2.0 or the high speed eSATA connection.

The small footprint, silent operation and large storage capability make any RAID Tower model ideal for a wide variety of storage applications in homes, small businesses or enterprises.

List price starts at $99 for the HPM and $245 for the RAID Tower Mini.