Addonics Technologies (http://www.addonics.com) has announced the 5-port HPM XU, a hardware port multiplier (HPM), that connects up to five SATA hard drives to high speed eSATA or the latest USB 3.0 ports on any system via just a single eSATA or USB cable. However, since Macs don't have USB 3.0 support, USB 3.0 devices will run at USB 2.0 speeds.

The new port multiplier comes with built-in RAID accelerator and supports sustained transfer exceeding 240 MB/second with five drives in RAID 5 configuration According to the folks at Addonics, 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 Mac OS X (10.4 and higher), Windows and Linux kernel 2.4 and above.

It fits 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. The drive and HPM status can be visually monitored by attaching LEDs to the onboard LED signal pin headers. 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 (fifteen 3.5-inch drives). Each tower allows users to create an external RAID solution 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.

List price starts at US$99 for the HPM and $245 for the RAID Tower Mini, For more information visit http://macte.ch/mvnSS .