e-SATA shares the same electrical specification as SATA. The primary difference is in the cable shielding specification. I would consider using a LSI card and an adapter to go from the non/lightly shielded internal SATA cable to the heavily shielded e-SATA cable. I am not aware of anyone who makes one with a repeater to maintain super high signal quality but it should work w/o such a device (supermicro does it all the time ;-], where as Intel doesn't).
If you get an 8-port card you could dump your onboard ports altogether and get the hot-plug you deserve. For 1068e based products you'll want the SAS3801-R -- while it comes with the RAID firmware it is designed for internal ports. The plan SAS3081 has two four port external plugs which you don't want. You should be able to flash the SAS3081-R with the IT firmware or simply not configure RAID on it, in which case the drives are exposed as JBODs by default. j. PS - you'll need an 8x PCI-e slot. http://www.ebay.com/sch/?_nkw=sas3081&clk_rvr_id=327631751749 if you have prime, these adapters ship for free. http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Delectronics&field- keywords=sata+to+e-sata+bracket#/ref=sr_nr_p_85_0?rh=n%3A172282%2Ck%3Asata+t o+e-sata+bracket%2Cp_85%3A2470955011&bbn=172282&keywords=sata+to+e-sata+brac ket&ie=UTF8&qid=1332871247&rnid=2470954011 -----Original Message----- From: Dan Swartzendruber [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Tuesday, March 27, 2012 6:11 AM To: 'Discussion list for OpenIndiana' Subject: [OpenIndiana-discuss] Need a PCI e-sata card for OI151a Here's my situation: m1015 with 6 sata drives for pool tank. 7th port has 15K 73GB SAS drive as cache device. 8th port currently connected to e-sata connector on front panel of case for monthly backups. 160GB sata drive on one of the 4 motherboard sata ports (supermicro pdsmi+). I have a 64GB crucial m4 I want to use as a log device, but plugging it into the motherboard seems to only yield sata1 speed (in addition to the fact that OI apparently refuses to even go to the grub menu and just hangs - sigh...) Even when I didn't have that issue (e.g. just switched from nexenta back to OI), I discovered the motherboard ports apparently do NOT support hot-plug, so switching the M4 and the e-sata connector is a no-go (unless I want to have to boot with the e-sata drive plugged in and turned on - LOL). My motherboard only has one pcie slot (x8) which is where the m1015 resides. So the plan is to get a pci card with e-sata connector. I've found a couple of cheap rosewill cards on newegg, that indicate the sil3512 chipset, but I'm having trouble finding out if that is supported or not. Any help appreciated! _______________________________________________ OpenIndiana-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://openindiana.org/mailman/listinfo/openindiana-discuss _______________________________________________ OpenIndiana-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://openindiana.org/mailman/listinfo/openindiana-discuss
