Friday afternoon hardware questions
Jarod Wilson
jarod at wilsonet.com
Wed Jan 23 11:54:58 EST 2008
On Wednesday 23 January 2008 08:42:10 am Tom Buskey wrote:
> On Jan 22, 2008 3:47 PM, Bill McGonigle <bill at bfccomputing.com> wrote:
> > It's not too bad - I have a 6' e.SATA cable on one of my drives. The
> > connectors are the worst of any technology I've ever seen - has
> > anybody here solved this? I think the multilink cables are better -
> > infiniband connector, IIRC.
>
> I have an infiniband to 4 SATA port adapter here. Looks like a decent
> design, but it's expensive. Which is why I don't have a 2nd adapter &
> cable to go with it.
>
> I have 42" regular SATA cables that seem to work well.
>
> I've also heard of multiport(path?) where 1 SATA port goes to 4-5 devices.
> Does Linux have device drivers for it? I know Solaris does not and MacOSX
> does.
Are you sure you're not thinking of the cabling setup 3ware uses on some of
their SATA raid cards? They call it 'multi-lane', and its really just a
compact single port on one end, which isn't a standard-looking sata
connector, but has the pins for like 4 sata connectors at the other end
(either via an octopus breakout cable or a connection to a hot-swap
backplane).
http://www.3ware.com/products/serial_ata2-9650.asp
http://www.satacables.com/html/sata_multilane-solutions.html
So far as I know, you don't need device driver support, you need device
support, and the presence of multi-lane vs. discrete is transparent to the
OS.
--
Jarod Wilson
jarod at wilsonet.com
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