On Mon, Feb 14, 2011 at 4:44 AM, Ross Walker <rswwalker at gmail.com> wrote: > On Feb 13, 2011, at 4:59 PM, Rudi Ahlers <Rudi at SoftDux.com> wrote: > >> On Sun, Feb 13, 2011 at 11:35 PM, John R Pierce <pierce at hogranch.com> wrote: >>> On 02/13/11 1:21 PM, Rudi Ahlers wrote: >>>> I'm trying to build a dense eSATA enclosure with say 16 or 24 drives :) >>> >>> thats a stunningly bad way to go about it. >>> >>> A) if you want JBOD, use a SAS/SATA enclosure with a SAS host card, as >>> SATA doesn't support multichannel multiplexing. >> >> >> mmm, I didn't think of this :) > > Dell has the MD1120 which is a 24 bay 2.5" SAS/SATA enclosure. I think it goes for $3000 plus cost of disk drives. > > If you want to go cheaper I believe Supermicro makes a 16 drive chassis that is meant for a server, but can be made into an external enclosure, or an iSCSI/NFS/CIFS storage server. > > -Ross > Thanx Ross. We got those 16 drive SuperMicro chassis, which is what I want to use, and they're already running FreeNAS which offers iSCSI & NFS. I just had this idea of exploring eSATA since most machines already have an eSATA port. So if I don't get this working, it's not a big deal. But, I think it could be a cheap alternative to SAS / FC interconnect. -- Kind Regards Rudi Ahlers SoftDux Website: http://www.SoftDux.com Technical Blog: http://Blog.SoftDux.com Office: 087 805 9573 Cell: 082 554 7532