Addonics Technologies (www.addonics.com) has announced  two 1U RAID Rack chassis with removable drive systems for adding and removing 2.5-inch hard drives or solid state drives.

The new family of products comes bundled with all the connecting cables for attaching to your system. Users can start their RAID Rack with just one drive and expand by adding more drives as their storage requirement grows. Depending on the model, the hard drives can be connected to the system with eSATA, or mini SAS cables and accommodate up to eight 2.5-inch HDDs/SSDs.

There are two models. The R1825SN-2MS allows the attaching of up to eight 2.5-inch SATA hard drives or SSDs with 9-9.5 mm maximum drive height to a computer via two external mini SAS cables. The R1825SN-8ES attaches to the computer via eight eSATA cables.

Drives, which will appear as eight independent drives when attached to any system, can be hot swapped when connecting to an eSATA host that supports such a feature. In addition, eight drives can be set to one or more RAID volumes via the OS RAID software utility.

The Addonics 1U RAID Racks come built-in with eight 2.5-inch Snap-In drive bays.  Drives can be added or removed from each drive bay-like tape cartridge without any special tools. The eight Snap-in bays are connected to two 4-SATA to mini SAS (SFF-8088) bridges on the back of the 1U Rack.

These two 1U Racks are ideal for storage applications that require adding multiple external drives to a computer as individual drives without RAID. They are also an economical and compact solution to use as a central storage for multiple computers.

Both models are OS independent. They retail for $399.