Pure Performance. Pure SATAsfaction!

When it comes to data storage capabilities, which do you prefer, raw storage capacity or scorching performance? With Sonnet's Tempo™ SATA E4P, you get the best of both worlds! This card offer unprecedented scalability through its support of port multipliers—it can handle up to twenty drives! ^{(1) (2)} Used with high-performance drive enclosures like Sonnet's Fusion™ 500P, port multipliers manage the data flow of up to five drives in one enclosure through a single cable. Using today's highest-capacity drives, you can connect an astounding 20 Terabytes (20,000 Gigabytes!) of storage!

Tempo SATA E4P delivers performance previously unattainable with mainstream technologies. The PCI Express interface offers huge bandwidth for data throughput, so the card never slows you down. For the utmost performance, you can create multiple RAID sets to capture and process uncompressed high definition video, or conquer other high-bandwidth applications. For fantastic flexibility, you can work with 20 drives individually and hot-swap them out as needed. ⁽³⁾ You can even work with a combination of RAID sets and individual drives—your choices aren't limited. When your storage needs have outgrown standard solutions, get a Tempo SATA E4P—it'll give you room to grow and blazing performance for the most demanding applications.

Technical Notes:

(1) Support for 20 drives requires the use of drive enclosures employing port multipliers (like Sonnet's Fusion 500P). When using an enclosure without a port multiplier (such as Sonnet's Fusion 400), Tempo SATA E4P will support up to 4 drives.

(2) Western Digital manufactures Desktop edition (WD Caviar, Caviar SE, Caviar SE16, and Raptor X) hard drives and Enterprise (RAID) Edition (WD RE, RE2, and Raptor) hard drives. Each type of hard drive is designed to work specifically in either a desktop computer environment, or connected to a RAID controller (hardware or software-based). If you intend to configure Western Digital drives in a RAID set, Sonnet and WD recommend using only their Enterprise edition hard drives. For more information, see this Western Digital FAQ.

(3) SATA drive hot swapping is not supported in a desktop or server PC running Windows XP, Server 2003 or Vista. A SATA drive appears to the system as a not-removable hard drive and there is no mechanism in Windows to prepare the drive for removal.

Key Benefits

• Affordable solution for adding four eSATA ports to your computer
• SATA II compliant, 1.5 Gb/s and 3 Gb/s auto-negotiation
• FIS-based Port Multiplier-aware to support up to 20 disk drives ^{(1) (2)}
• Native PCI Express (PCIe) x4 host bus interface for high-performance applications
• Spread Spectrum Clocking (SSC) support for compatibility with all SATA drives
• Hot-swap drive support ⁽³⁾

Mac Compatibility

• Mac® Pro
• Power Mac® G5 (with PCI Express x4 slots)
• Mac OS X Version 10.2 or later

Windows Compatibility

• PC (with PCI Express x4 slots) ⁽³⁾
• Windows® XP SP 2 or later ⁽³⁾
• Windows Vista ⁽³⁾

Technical Specifications

Advanced Features

• Port Multiplier aware
• FIS-based switching controller
• True plug-and-play; no device drivers to install
• Spread Spectrum Clocking for compatibility with all SATA drivers and lower EMI emissions
• Bus Mastering frees CPU from data I/O handling
• 48-bit LBA support for drives larger than 137 GB

Specifications subject to change without notice.