On 2/13/11 1:58 PM, Rudi Ahlers wrote: > > Sure, I understand what you're saying, but the question is: If they > can do it with a cheap device like this, then surely one should be > able todo it with a normal / server motherboard? Obviously they won't > tell us their secrets, so I need to dig around to see how todo it > myself. This particular device has a eSATA slave + eSATA Master mode. > i.e. I can connect another device to this one and they both work > together, and then when I connect the first one to my PC, I have 2 > HDD's - i.e. a cheap JBOD implementation. If you are going to pass eSATA straight through, why would you want the other motherboard involved at all instead of just using an external eSata enclosure? > I'm trying to see if I can setup a Linux JBOD on a server chassis > with say 16 HDD's or something, and then connect it to another server > via eSATA - i.e. building a cheap scalable SAN. It might make sense to RAID a bunch of disks locally, and export the combined device as iscsi. > P.S. You actually do get USB cross-over cables: > http://en.kioskea.net/faq/342-connecting-two-computers-with-a-usb-cable > - they work quite well. They're not as fast a gigabit but works very > well for older PC's without LAN. I thought those were really implemented as back-to-back ethernet converters. -- Les Mikesell lesmikesell at gmail.com