SATA PCI Express Card, 4 Port, CalDigit FASTA-4e

  SATA PCI Express Card - CalDigit FASTA-4e, 4 eSATA Ports
 
System Requirements
   
 

Discontinued by Manufacturer
Alternative products:

eSATA 4 Port PCI Express Controller Card
Sonnet Tempo SATA E4P

CalDigit 4 Port eSATA PCI Express Card

Designed for video editing, this PCI Express SATA II host adapter can easily handle multiple streams of a variety video formats such as 10 bit uncompressed HD, 8 bit uncompressed HD, DVCPro HD, 8 bit SD, 10 bit SD and HDV!

Compatible with Apple's latest Mac Pro, Power Mac G5 Dual-core (Late 2005) and any PC equipped with an x8 PCI-e slot, the CalDigit FASTA-4e features high speed SATA 3G connection at 3Gb/s bandwidth and allows you to connect up to 4 external SATA devices. With the Port Multiplier compatibility, the FASTA-4e can support up to 20 hard drives!

  • 4 External eSATA 3Gb/s SATA II Ports
  • Port Multiplier aware - supports up to 20 disk drives*
  • Native PCI Express (PCIe) x8 8-lane host bus interface for high-performance applications, including Final Cut Pro, Adobe Premiere, Aperture, Photoshop, Lightroom, iMovie, iPhoto, ProTools, Sony Vegas, Avid Liquid.
  • 20% to 80% faster than other SATA cards
  • Supports Mac OSX and Windows XP RAID
  • Plug and Play
  • Backward compatible with SATA I drives
  • Compatible with AJA, BMD and Matrox video capture cards
  • Manufacturers 3-year warranty

*Support for 20 drives requires the use of drive enclosures employing port multipliers (like Sonnet's Fusion 500P Port Multiplier Enclosure or this SATA Port Multiplier Enclosure, 5-Bay with LCDs). When using enclosures without a port multiplier, the CalDigit FASTA-4e PCI Express host adapter will support up to 4 drives.

Not all SATA cards are built the same
"Peak Performance" is not an accurate gauge of performance for video editing and other applications with large file sizes.  What matters most is the sustained throughput.

In tests using a Mac Pro and 5 SATA II hard drives striped (RAID 0) in a port multiplier enclosure, the FASTA-4e produced sustained reads of 228MB/s with writes of 211MB/s!  

Using a 2GHz G5 Dual-core, with 4 SATA II drives in a RAID 0 direct connect configuration (each drive on a separate port), the CalDigit FASTA-4e produced sustained reads of 295MB/s with writes of 301MB/s!

With the CalDigit FASTA-4e, you have the potential to actually use the greatest speeds and highest sustained throughput available with SATA II 3Gb/s interface drives.  Supporting high capacity and high sustained data transfer rates, the FASTA-4e is ideal for setting up video and photo editing "scratch disks", huge photo/MP3/movie libraries and small to medium business file servers.

Includes:

  • CalDigit FASTA-4e PCI-e (PCI Express) Host Adapter 
  • User's Guide 

System Requirements:

  • Desktop computer with available x8 PCI Express (PCI-e) slot
  • Windows XP SP2
  • Mac Pro, Power Mac G5 Dual-Core with Mac OS X 10.4.x or later
    Not compatible with G5s having PCI-X slots. If you are not sure what type of slots you have, check your manual.

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