<div class="gmail_quote">On Tue, Apr 8, 2008 at 9:06 AM, Yan Seiner <<a href="mailto:yan@seiner.com">yan@seiner.com</a>> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="PADDING-LEFT: 1ex; MARGIN: 0px 0px 0px 0.8ex; BORDER-LEFT: #ccc 1px solid">Anyone have experience with esata drives and port multipliers?<br><br>I have a pile of 250 GB and 300 GB IDE drives, and I've been toying with<br>
the idea of converting them to SATA, then sticking them into an<br>enclosure, and plugging the whole mess into an esata port on my server.<br><br>Bingo, an extra 750 GB of storage (if I do RAID-5) or 1.1 TB if I do LVM.<br>
<br>So far, I've found this:<br><br><a href="http://www.caloptic.com/cgi-bin/quikstore.cgi?category=eSATA_Bridge_Adapters" target="_blank">http://www.caloptic.com/cgi-bin/quikstore.cgi?category=eSATA_Bridge_Adapters</a><br>
<a href="http://www.caloptic.com/cgi-bin/quikstore.cgi?product=SATAII-5Port&detail=yes" target="_blank">http://www.caloptic.com/cgi-bin/quikstore.cgi?product=SATAII-5Port&detail=yes</a><br><a href="http://www.caloptic.com/cgi-bin/quikstore.cgi?product=PM3726&detail=yes" target="_blank">http://www.caloptic.com/cgi-bin/quikstore.cgi?product=PM3726&detail=yes</a><br>
<a href="http://www.caloptic.com/cgi-bin/quikstore.cgi?product=SATAII-5Port-H&detail=yes" target="_blank">http://www.caloptic.com/cgi-bin/quikstore.cgi?product=SATAII-5Port-H&detail=yes</a><br><br>They all use the same SIL chipset for the multiplier.<br>
<br>Then use one of these for each drive:<br><br><a href="http://www.monoprice.com/products/product.asp?c_id=104&cp_id=10407&cs_id=1040701&p_id=327&seq=1&format=2" target="_blank">http://www.monoprice.com/products/product.asp?c_id=104&cp_id=10407&cs_id=1040701&p_id=327&seq=1&format=2</a><br>
<br>The enclosure I have. So for something like $130, I can add about 1 TB<br>to my system. Not a bad deal - if it works.<br><br>Thoughts?</blockquote>
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<div>Seems like for $130 you might be able to get a decent case, motherboard/cpu combo (doesn't need much) and a regular IDE PCI board and just build a server. Then just iSCSI or NFS mount it back to your main system. I did this recently with a stack of 5 160GB drives using a free after rebate case, leftover boards and memory and buying a SATA/IDE PCI board. Ended up with software RAID 5, about 600GB of iSCSI space that I mounted over to my Vista box for photo storage.</div>
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<div>Kevin</div></div>