Review of the Sonnet Tempo SATA E4P

Our friends from AMUG have released a long and detailed article about the Sonnet Tempo SATA E4P 4 Port External PCI Express Host Adapter.

This card provides a native PCI Express (PCIe) solution featuring 4x host bus interface with FIS-based port multiplier capability: in other word when using bay port multiplier enclosures on can control up to 20 HDs.
This card does not work with PCI-Express 8x, and does not provide booting capability; but can manage deep sleep mode.
Performance of this card are quite impressive:
- with 4 HDs RAID 0 on can reach 200-240MB/s (in writing and reading modes respectively)
- With 2 of those cards and 8 HDs one can reach 500MB/s data transfer rate.
- With 20 HDs plugged via an port multiplier enclosure, the transfer speed can go even higher to 700 MB/s !!
Direct link to the full article, worth reading it!