Products: Addonics Technologies

Even as smaller, higher-capacity drives find new uses, vendors are also getting imaginative with other storage devices. Take Addonics Technologies, known mainly for its line of prosumer-level storage gear and accessories. A couple of months ago the San Jose, Calif.-based company released the Addonics 4-Slot UDD. Based upon the PCMCIA form factor, the box is small (about 5"×5"×4") and weighs about a pound. It's flexible, too. The UDD reads and writes to any combination you pop in: four hard drives, four ATA flash cards, or four of any type of flash media with USB 2.0 or SATA connections.

Because it also employs four independent USB connections, users can simultaneously read/write or transfer data to as many as four PC Card hard drives or four ATA Flash, or any combination of four flash media devices. The transfer rate for each slot — at the full USB 2.0 rate or that of the latest SATA drives — runs up to 150Mbps. Add an Addonics SATA RAID controller, and you've got the smallest RAID array on the market. www.addonics.com