Hi, On Sun, Jan 25, 2009 at 17:02, <centos at 911networks.com> wrote: > Does anybody has any experience with e-sata on CentOS5.2? Yes. > - How fast is it? Same as an internal sata? Same as internal. Just the connector is different. > - Does it support sata-2? > - Does it "hot-plug" like a USB? Depends on the adapter you get. First time I got an Adaptec eSATA II RAID 1225SA and it turns out that, even though they use a standard Silicon Image 3132 (IIRC) that is supported by the sata_sil24 native driver, they ship it with a non-default PCI ID, so the default kernel in CentOS 5 does not recognize it. I opened a bug for it and I got the patch to include that PCI ID in CentOS-plus kernel, so if you use that kernel the adapter will work. Anyway, I would stay away of it if possible. http://www.adaptec.com/en-US/support/raid/sataii/AAR-1225SA/ Second time around I got one from StarTech.com, it also uses the sata_sil24 native driver, and this one works out of the box. I just had a small glitch to have it recognized by the server the first time around, which was fixed by moving it to another PCIe slot (not sure why it did not work on the first one I tried). I can recommend this one: http://www.startech.com/item/PEXESATA2-2-Port-PCI-Express-eSATA-Controller-Card.aspx Both work with SATA II (3Gbps) and both support "hot-plug", only in some cases you may need to force scanning (with a command such as "echo 1 >/sys/class/scsi_host/hostX/scan"), I'm not sure if you have to do that always or not. Here some information on Linux SATA drivers, very useful: http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Hardware/sata.html Stay away from those that need proprietary drivers. I still would like to find an adapter that works with the Linux ahci driver, since that seems to be the best one, at least from information in that web page, but so far no luck finding them... HTH, Filipe