On Jun 1, 2009, at 5:57 PM, Benjamin Smith lists@benjamindsmith.com wrote:

Tired of "little problems" trying to keep 7 drives working in an old desktop computer, I'm considering an external SATA drive enclosure with a controller card based on the Sil3124. http://www.ipcdirect.net/servlet/Detail?no=152

I'm a bit concerned about long-term support, namely that the company's driver page only lists drivers through RedHat 4. http://www.siliconimage.com/support/searchresults.aspx?pid=27&cat=3

Does anybody else have experience with this controller? How has it been for you?

If you have experience with an external SATA enclosure(s), what did you use and how did it work for you?

I use the Dell MD1000 enclosures with good results, but they only certify certain drives with their enclosures and they may have tweaked firmware, so open market drives will have variable results.

Their drive prices are good too if you have a quote generated they are 20-30% off their web site's list price.

The real key is the controller though. Get one that can do hardware RAID1/10, 5/50, 6/60, if it can do both SATA and SAS even better and get a battery backed write-back cache, the bigger the better, 256MB good, 512MB better, 1GB best.

-Ross

Few days late responding to this. Sorry, just catching up on emails.

Benjamin Smith wrote:

Tired of "little problems" trying to keep 7 drives working in an old desktop computer, I'm considering an external SATA drive enclosure with a controller card based on the Sil3124. http://www.ipcdirect.net/servlet/Detail?no=152

Been there, done that. Upgraded to a Norco DS1220 12bay e-SATA unit for my MythTV machine. Thinking of adding a second one.

I'm a bit concerned about long-term support, namely that the company's driver page only lists drivers through RedHat 4. http://www.siliconimage.com/support/searchresults.aspx?pid=27&cat=3

The sata_sil cards are pretty well supported by the sata_sil24 driver in kernels >= 2.6.25, or earlier kernels with the libata patches applied.

Does anybody else have experience with this controller? How has it been for you?

Not that controller, but pretty similar:

[darryl@server1 ~]$ /sbin/lspci | grep RAID 01:00.0 RAID bus controller: Silicon Image, Inc. SiI 3132 Serial ATA Raid II Controller (rev 01)

If you have experience with an external SATA enclosure(s), what did you use and how did it work for you?

As mentioned, I have a Norco DS1220[1] which has only one 'strange' thing about it. It has 12 bays. It is wired with 2 lots of 5 drives on a port multiplier and the 11th and 12th drive as straight e-SATA with no port multiplier for a total of 4 e-SATA ports. I thought it would have made more sense to put 4 on 3 multipliers or 3 on 4 multipliers, but anyway.

What I did with mine was to use one of those PC back panel brackets that have a couple of eSATA ports and plug into the motherboard SATA connectors and have my boot drives on those. That way the drives are still in the enclosure but the motherboard sees them on the on-board ports.

Regards Darryl

[1] http://www.norcotek.com/DS-1220.php