Addonics Technologies has announced the Sapphire 5-slot CFast drive and the Sapphire CF, a family of four flash drive solutions designed for creating your own SSD (solid state drive) RAID array to improve storage performance.

The new line lowers power consumption and improves overall system reliability for application environments with frequent shocks and vibrations because SSDs have no moving parts unlike traditional hard drives, according to the folks at Addonics. The Sapphire 5-slot CFast drive (pictured) is for CFast media. The Sapphire CF is for CF.

Both offer USB 3.0 or eSATA interfaces for creating your own SSD storage solution using commercially available CFast cards. The two models with USB 3.0 connection allow you to configure five CFast or CF cards to appear as independent drives.

They can be set up as a high performance, fault tolerant RAID group or a large capacity solid state drive. The CFast or CF cards can be configured as RAID 0 (Striping), RAID1 (Mirroring), RAID 5 (Parity), RAID10 (Mirrored Striped), JBOD (Concatenation), Clone Mode (N-Way Mirror) using built-in hardware RAID, or as five individual drives without RAID.

The two models with eSATA connection only support connecting all five media to a single high speed 6G eSATA port. The five media appears as five individual drives or can be formed as a RAID group using the RAID utility of the OS or the attached host connector.

When connecting via eSATA, the Sapphire CFast or CF drive can be used as a bootable device. The Sapphire drives allow you to add or remove CFast cards from each slot without any special tools. These Sapphire drives are OS independent, complete plug-and-play solutions with no drivers required.

Each of the Sapphire products comes in two models, which range in price from US$249 to $279. For more details about the various models, visit www.addonics.com/products/s5cfaseu3.php or www.addonics.com/products/s5cfeu3.php.