Addonics Technologies Inc. announced Monday its new, a feature-rich hardware port multiplier, which provides connections of up to five SATA (Serial-ATA) drives to any SATA port.

The new port multiplier will be beneficial to those wanting to attach numerous hard drives to a desktop or server as an individual drive or as a RAID (redundant array of independent disks) volume with redundancy.

The HPM can also be used to connect five SATA optical drives, such as DVD-RRW or Blu-ray drives for simultaneous data copying. Configuration can be set through a set of onboard jumpers or the bundled software utility under Windows operating system (OS).

The HPM XA comes in a system or an enclosure version. The system version enables multiple hard drives inside a system to be connected together to form a RAID volume or to be used as individual drives. The enclosure version fits into the Addonics family of storage tower and storage rack products, and many standard multi-bay enclosures with standard SCSI-1 connector cut out. The five hard drives inside the drive enclosure, once configured, can be attached to any computer via high speed eSATA (external SATA) connection or USB (universal serial bus) 2.0 by attaching the optional Addonics eSATA-USB adapter.

Drive and the HPM status can be visually monitored by attaching LEDs to the onboard LED signal pin headers or via the bundled monitoring software. Any drive failure or RAID error can be notified through audible alert from the on board buzzer and emailed to an SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) account.

Product features include an integrated hardware RAID controller to maximize performance; RAID configuration using onboard jumpers for simple deployment; RAID configuration and RAID management software; the ability to daisy chain multiple units; system mounts; hot swap support; drive activity and error LED for host and five SATA devices, and support for Windows, Macintosh and Linux operating systems.

List price is $99 for both the system version and the enclosure version.