On 03/12/2012 12:37 PM, m.roth at 5-cent.us wrote: >> So today I use TB size drives dropped into an external docking station. >> The docking station plugs into the server using eSATA. Then it's a >> relatively simple script run by cron to handle the daily backup. I'm > Yup. Our home directories (NFS mounted) are on 2TB (or are being moved to > them) drives; and we have online nightly b/u's that way. The semiweekly > offline b/u's are to 3TB drives, dropped into an eSATA bay. The eSATA bay > is about an order of magnitude cheaper than your vendor's recommending, > and the eSATA uses bare drives, not even needing sleds. *Much* cheaper and > easier. > What hardware are you using for docking stations? Do you use multiple drives per ESATA port? What is your ESATA controller? I've been using Thermaltake ST0014U's for some time now with USB interfaces and I recently tried plugging them into the ESATA port (using onboard Intel controller/AHCI driver) of a Dell R210 running CentOS 6. It doesn't seem to work with the port multiplier and I can only use one of the two drive slots. Even if there aren't two drives, only one of the slots work. Both slots work with USB. I get the following errors from the driver: ar 5 16:06:33 myserver kernel: ata6.15: Port Multiplier 1.1, 0x197b:0x2352 r0, 2 ports, feat 0x0/0x0 Mar 5 16:06:33 myserver kernel: ata6.15: Asynchronous notification not supported, hotplug won't Mar 5 16:06:33 myserver kernel: work on fan-out ports. Use warm-plug instead. Mar 5 16:06:33 myserver kernel: ata6.00: hard resetting link Mar 5 16:06:33 myserver kernel: ata6.00: SATA link up 3.0 Gbps (SStatus 123 SControl 320) Mar 5 16:06:33 myserver kernel: ata6.01: hard resetting link Mar 5 16:06:33 myserver kernel: ata6.15: qc timeout (cmd 0xe4) Mar 5 16:06:33 myserver kernel: ata6.01: failed to read SCR 2 (Emask=0x4) Mar 5 16:06:33 myserver kernel: ata6.01: failed to read SCR 2 (Emask=0x40) Mar 5 16:06:33 myserver kernel: ata6.01: COMRESET failed (errno=-5) Mar 5 16:06:33 myserver kernel: ata6.01: failed to read SCR 0 (Emask=0x40) Mar 5 16:06:33 myserver kernel: ata6.01: reset failed, giving up Mar 5 16:06:33 myserver kernel: ata6.15: hard resetting link Mar 5 16:06:33 myserver kernel: ata6.15: SATA link up 3.0 Gbps (SStatus 123 SControl 300) Mar 5 16:06:33 myserver kernel: ata6.00: hard resetting link Mar 5 16:06:33 myserver kernel: ata6.00: SATA link up 3.0 Gbps (SStatus 123 SControl 320) Mar 5 16:06:33 myserver kernel: ata6.01: hard resetting link Mar 5 16:06:33 myserver kernel: ata6.01: SATA link down (SStatus 0 SControl 320) Mar 5 16:06:33 myserver kernel: ata6.00: qc timeout (cmd 0xec) Mar 5 16:06:33 myserver kernel: ata6.00: failed to IDENTIFY (I/O error, err_mask=0x4) Mar 5 16:06:33 myserver kernel: ata6.15: hard resetting link I would ideally like to get several drives on a single ESATA controller (At least 4 would be nice, though I know it won't have amazing performance if I access multiple drives at once). Nataraj