Specifications, Availability and Pricing

The AXUS FiT 500 is part of the FiT Series which consists of several different products. The 500E and 500F are nearly identical except for the addition of IEEE 1394b (FireWire 800) being included with the 500F. Today we are reviewing the FiT 500E, a five bay tower style direct attached storage unit that is able to connect to the host machine via USB 2.0 or eSATA.

Utilizing a maximum of five 3.5 inch form factor hard drives, the FiT 500E can run RAID 0,1,3, 5 and 10 as well as some special modes like Clone and Large. The Large mode is better known as Span on other devices and does not offer any data redundancy or performance increase. A majority of users should use RAID 5 over three or more hard drives for its data redundancy and performance increase over a single drive.

Like most other DAS systems, you are able to use Linux, Apple and Microsoft operating systems since all of the RAID activities are handled by the DAS controller. The operating system sees the DAS as a simple hard drive.

Pricing and availability is still a little skittish for the FiT 500E. In the U.S. only one e-tailer is carrying the unit, PC Pit Stop, and they are leveraging their position by offering it for nearly 500 Dollars, a full 70 Dollars more than the MSRP. This practice is so disturbing that we are not even going to link to the page, but hopefully over the next couple of months we will start to see more e-tailers carrying the AXUS product line.