kony said:
An external that can do RAID natively has it's own internal
controller for that. You'd have to source a controller
board with the capability or essentially buy the enclosure
and rip the board out to put in another enclosure which
doesn't seem to make much sense as you had a sufficient
sized enclosure already (else they'd not go to the bother of
having it support RAID5).
There is no cheap way to put 4 or 5 HDD in an enclosure,
unless you had 4 or 5 eSATA ports on your system already so
you needed no bridge or controller boards in the external
enclosure. Otherwise you could string several USB cables
from the system or one cable to a USB hub put inside, then
short cables from the hub to several separate USB-IDE
converters. This too will start to get expensive with the
custom case, hub and all the boards and cables... and be
lower performance.
This PCI card supports Esata, plus it is also compatible with
Port Multipliers. SIL3124 Chipset ( SD-SATA2-2E2I ) $50 USD.
http://www.syba.com/product/43/02/08/index.html
http://www.newegg.com/Product/CustratingReview.asp?Item=N82E16816124003
(I'm not really certain the Syba card uses an Esata connector.
This is an example of a SATA to Esata adapter, and as near
as I can tell, the connectors are roughly the same. With products
like this, sometimes you have to buy them, and then figure out
what kind of cable to use. There are all manner of mixtures of
Esata and sata cabling.
http://www.shopaddonics.com/mmSHOPADDONICS/Images/aasatab2-e.gif )
This is the SII3124 here, with the third port showing a Port
Multiplier connected.
http://www.siliconimage.com/products/product.aspx?id=27
This is the Silicon Image port multiplier chip (3726)
http://www.siliconimage.com/products/product.aspx?id=26
This is a port multiplier box ($100) that uses SII3726.
http://www.cooldrives.com/cosapomubrso.html
If you place the port multiplier box, plus five disk drives,
in an old ATX computer case, plus a power supply wired to be
always on (PS_ON# connected to COM), you have an enclosure
suitable for five drives. Running an ESata cable from the Syba
PCI card, to the Port Multiplier input port, completes the
connection.
Does it work ? We won't know until someone tries it
But it is one way to make an expansion box. Performance
is limited by the bandwidth of the PCI bus on the host
motherboard.
Paul
