[mythtv-users] esata drives - experience?

[Krzysztof Adamski]

On Tue, 2008-08-04 at 10:44 -0500, Kevin Kuphal wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 8, 2008 at 9:06 AM, Yan Seiner <yan at seiner.com> wrote:
>         Anyone have experience with esata drives and port multipliers?
>         
>         I have a pile of 250 GB and 300 GB IDE drives, and I've been
>         toying with
>         the idea of converting them to SATA, then sticking them into
>         an
>         enclosure, and plugging the whole mess into an esata port on
>         my server.
>         
>         Bingo, an extra 750 GB of storage (if I do RAID-5) or 1.1 TB
>         if I do LVM.
>         
>         So far, I've found this:
>         
>         http://www.caloptic.com/cgi-bin/quikstore.cgi?category=eSATA_Bridge_Adapters
>         http://www.caloptic.com/cgi-bin/quikstore.cgi?product=SATAII-5Port&detail=yes
>         http://www.caloptic.com/cgi-bin/quikstore.cgi?product=PM3726&detail=yes
>         http://www.caloptic.com/cgi-bin/quikstore.cgi?product=SATAII-5Port-H&detail=yes
>         
>         They all use the same SIL chipset for the multiplier.
>         
>         Then use one of these for each drive:
>         
>         http://www.monoprice.com/products/product.asp?c_id=104&cp_id=10407&cs_id=1040701&p_id=327&seq=1&format=2
>         
>         The enclosure I have.  So for something like $130, I can add
>         about 1 TB
>         to my system.  Not a bad deal - if it works.
>         
>         Thoughts?
>  
> 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.

For lower overhead you can use AoE instead of iSCSI if both machines are
on the same LAN.

K