What are the limits for those eSATA cables that connect directly to a
SATA port in the motherboard through a simple converter?
1m total. True eSATA is electrically a bit (not a lot) different
to suppoer the increased cable lenght. However everything
going over (e)SATA is checksummed, so you should not get data
corruption with an occasional error. With a lot of interface
errors, you could also get silent corruption, since the checksums
have a probablility of not catching multiple errors in one
data package.
I would need to look up what checksums are used in detail
to estimate how likely that is. If it is CRC32, then the
probability of an uncaught error is very roughly one
in 2^32 for multiple (>= 32) random errors per data block.
That is pretty low and an SATA connection with that many
errors will be severely slowed down anyways, think > 100x
slower. In additition the OS (or RAID controller) will
decide that such a disk is unusable because of repeated
errors pretty fast.
Bottom line: It may fail or be slow but will in most cases
not silently corrupt your data, so you can try it out.
Just do not expet it to be really reliable, even if it
works.
Arno
