14 DAY TRIAL // Sharkoon has many peripherals and storage devices up for sale, and two products of the latter category have been added to the list.
Sharkoon's formal press release is about the 5-Bay RAID Station and the 8-Bay RAID Station.
Long story short, they are NAS devices (Network-Attached Storage) that take multiple 2.5-inch or 3.4-inch SATA hard drives and run them in one of several RAID modes.
Sharkoon 5-Bay RAID handles RAID modes Clone, R1, R3, R5 and R10 in RAID levels Clean, Large, Clone, R0, R1, R3, R5 and R10.
Sharkoon 8-Bay Station supports RAID modes Clean, Large, R00, R30 and R50, plus automatic rebuild function for the last two.
The DIP switches on the rear panel are used to select between the modes, while front LEDs indicate operation, rebuild mode and disk activity.
As for the link to a PC, it is made via USB 3.0 or eSATA, which means that networks won't be able to access them directly (through LAN). On the flip side, SATA allows for a host of benefits, like port multiplier function, SATA speed autonegotiation, Spread-spectrum clocking, BIST, Loopback mode, Native Command Queue (NCQ), asynchronous signal recovery,48-bit LBA addressing, asynchronous notification, Hot-Plug in Clean mode, port multiplier aware and non-port multiplier aware host in RAID mode.
The prices of the items, with 250W power supplies included, are €199 / $242 for the 5-Bay and 329 Euro / 400.91 Euro for the 8-Bay. Check with local retailers.
