Friday afternoon hardware questions

[Jarod Wilson]

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