Going to need a significant amount of storage soon. eSATA it’s significantly cheaper than a SAS enclosure + card.

I had thought that if i’m going to use a snapraid setup for these drives (to make it so only one drive it’s active for any given opperation, it should work the same.

Any experience with this type of setup?

  •  bobj33   ( @bobj33@alien.top ) BEnglish
    2•1 year ago

    Anything eSATA is probably over 10 years old now.

    If it is an enclosure with just 1 hard drive then it will probably work fine. If you are looking at an eSATA enclosure with multiple hard drives then it probably has a SATA port multiplier inside. SATA port multipliers require specific port multiplier support from the main SATA controller in your PC. As far as I know none of the Intel or AMD SATA controllers on a motherboard support port multipliers. You have to use another PCIE SATA card with support for that. My experience with them 10 years ago is that they are all flaky and will suffer from random disconnects and dropouts.

    USB3 is far more popular now and basically killed eSATA. USB can also have problems with random disconnects.

    How many drives do you need in the external enclosure? Commerically available SAS enclosures are expensive. If you have an old PC case and power supply you can make that into a SAS enclosure with a few cables and adapters

    Get an LSI SAS HBA “8e” card like this

    https://www.ebay.com/itm/163534822734?epid=28034148027&hash=item26136f5d4e:g:5sEAAOSwdwlcX2E3

    A couple SFF-8088 to 4X SATA cables

    https://www.amazon.com/Female-3-3FTCable-Controller-Target-Backplane/dp/B08NGGPPCY/

    A power supply jumper like this

    https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0756WFMNF/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1

    I’ve got 8 drives in an old PC case like this and it works great with no disconnects ever.

    •  chipt4   ( @chipt4@beehaw.org ) English
      1•1 year ago

      This would be the route I’d take if I were in your shoes, OP. Basically a DIY DAS (direct attach storage). If you have an old case + PSU, all you’d really need is the LSI card, which can be had for roughly $35 on eBay, and some cheap cables.

      Alternatively, upgrade your current case to one that can support more drives and do it all in one case. You’d still need the LSI card and some cables, maybe a 1 to 4 SATA power splitter or two for the additional drives.