On Feb 14, 2011, at 2:27 AM, Rudi Ahlers <Rudi at SoftDux.com> wrote: > 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. Then take the supermicro chassis without motherboard, get an eSATA to SATA connector, connect it to a port multiplier and then to the 16 drives and see if that works. -Ross