Industry Brands, Warehouse Prices!

With FASTA-4e, you have the potential to actually use the greatest speeds and the best STR (Sustainable Transfer Rate) that are available with SATA 1.5Gb/s and 3Gb/s interfaces, when you begin to stack SATA drives together in RAID (like SATA dumb box, Port Multiplier-aware enclosure or CalDigit S2VR Hardware RAID series).

Supporting high capacity and sustained data transfer, FASTA-4e is ideal for connecting to video and photo editing "scratch disks", huge photo/MP3/movie libraries and small to medium business file servers.

Sustained Transfer for Video Editing:

Not all SATA cards built the same. The "Peak Performance" is not the gauge of video editing; STR (Sustainable Transfer Rate) is the gauge.

The following test result show FASTA-4e's Outstanding Performance and Sustainable Transfer Rate optimized for a variety of high bandwidth applications, including High Definition (HD) video editing and capture.

Test 1:

FASTA-4e SATA Adapter Test Result Machine: Apple Mac Pro CalDigit FASTA-4e SATA card 5-drive Port Multiplier Enclosure     connecting to one SATA port on FASTA-4e 5 drives OS stripped AJA KONA System Test (Version 2) Result:    Read - 228MB/s Sustained    Write - 211MB/s

Other 4-Port SATA Adapter Test Result Machine: G5 Dual-core 2GHz* Other 4-port SATA card 5-drive Port Multiplier Enclosure     connecting to one SATA port on SATA card 5 drives OS stripped AJA KONA System Test (Version 2) Result:    Read - 120MB - 220MB/s    Average 171MB/s, NOT sustained,    Write - 181MB/s * No Mac Pro compatible SATA card at this moment.

Test 2:

FASTA-4e with SATA Dumb Boxes Machine: G5 Dual-core 2GHz CalDigit FASTA-4 SATA card 2x 2-bay SATA dumb box     connecting to four SATA ports on FASTA-4e 4 drives OS stripped AJA KONA System Test (Version 2) Result:     Read - 295MB/s Sustained     Write - 301MB/s

Other SATA card with Dumb Boxes Machine: G5 Dual-core 2GHz Other 4-port SATA card 2x 2-bay SATA dumb box     connecting to four SATA ports on SATA card 4 drives OS stripped AJA KONA System Test (Version 2) Result:    Read - 120MB - 240MB/s    Average 160MB/s, NOT sustained,    Write - Average 254MB/s

From above result, FASTA-4e is 20% to 80% faster than any other SATA cards and is the only PCI-e SATA card designed for Video Editing. It supports 10 bit uncompressed HD, 8 bit uncompressed HD, DV, HDV, DVCPRO HD, 8-bit and 10-bit SD video, etc. workflows.

Right Gear to Digital Darkroom

Being a photographer, loading or searching through thousands of pictures via USB or FireWire interface may not be practical or efficient. CalDigit’s FASTA-4e is based on 8-lane PCI Express 3Gbps SATA architecture, which is an ideal and easier way for storing photo libraries. Comparing to the 2-drive FireWire800 RAID solution at 75MB/s, FASTA-4e can reach 148MB/s when connecting to a 2-drive SATA RAID storage. (Like CalDigit's S2VR 2-drive Hardware RAID).
By populating 20 SATA drives in one FASTA-4e, you can reach 900MB/s.
This is more cost- and time-effective solution for digital image processing.



Enhance Your Editing Experience

If you are a video editor working with FinalCut Pro on a Mac Pro, G5 Dual-core or PC workstation, this card is designed for you. FASTA-4e 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, HDV, etc. It allows you to connect up to 4 external S2VR with up to 20 drives and with 3Gbps bandwidth for each port for the fastest data transfer.

No More Costly Fibre Channel or SCSI

At 450+ MBps**, editors can easily handle 10 bit uncompressed HD footage with real time effects without waiting for rendering or spending money on expensive Fibre Channel or SCSI solution. This is the most affordable solution for video editors who work in a small to mid sized studio with a budget.

Upgrade your Mac Pro and G5 Dual-core

FASTA-4e provides the missing external SATA ports for the Mac Pro and G5 Dual-core. The FASTA-4e offers four external SATA 3G ports at up to 3 Gbps. FASTA-4e enables individual drives or RAID arrays to be fully utilized as high-performance storage on your Mac Pro and G5 Dual-core.

Why choose SATA HBA for video editing?

SATA is an evolutionary replacement for the PATA storage interface. It provides affordable pricing, high performance data transfer rate, expandable and friendly configuration. It is the latest technology to replace FireWire, USB and Fibre channel, etc.

For the video professionals, FASTA-4e will free up the FireWire bus of your Mac Pro and G5 to allow video capture devices such as DV camcorders, VCR, AJA Io, LA, LD, etc. that requires the full bandwidth of FireWire and high speed access to external hard drives.

What is SATA 3G?

SATA 3G is the latest SATA technology that supports up to 3G bit per second. SATA 3G is double the speed/bandwidth of the original SATA I (1.5Gb/s).

Fibre Channel VS. SATA 3G?

For editors that need to share the same content data in the same storage pool, Fibre Channel is a good choice. A Fibre Channel solution requires an expensive RAID storage box, SAN management software such as Apple's Xsan, a Fibre Channel switch, and Fibre Channel HBA. The initial investment will be over $10,000. SATA 3G is the alternative solution for editors and studios that do no require sharing the same content in the same storage pool but need high performance and data integrity.

What is FASTA?

FASTA is the series of CalDigit SATA 3G host cards that utilize the PCI-e/PCI-x interface to offer huge bandwidth for data throughput. It is dedicated to video editors that require high performance and reliability.

Port Multipiler

The port multiplier design allows connectivity for up to 5 drives per port/channel and up to 20 drives per our FASTA host adapter (FASTA-4e, FASTA-4x). No complicated cabling needed.