Friday afternoon hardware questions

[Bill McGonigle]

On Jan 23, 2008, at 08:42, Tom Buskey wrote:

> 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.


Yeah, like Jarod said, this is just 4x4 (e.)SATA.  I think I've seen  
a multilane port/plate that takes an expansion slot with 4 SATA  
connectors on the back, to hook up to one of your internal SATA cards.

Your mail made me go look at multilane cables again, and I found this  
puppy:

   http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816133007

which is about 75% cheaper than when I last looked (before the NewEgg  
effect applied to these products too).

Ah, look at the next to last picture there to see the SATA to  
multilane connectors.

So, USB is about $35 for a decent case.  At 12 drives, that's $420.   
This case is about $600 since the review indicates you need to  
replace the fans for noise (if that's a factor - it is for me).  Plus  
it looks like about $500 for controllers and cables.   USB  
Controllers are very cheap, if you don't have a bunch of extra mobo  
headers already (mine had 12 ports stubbed - I needed some $9 plates  
to connect them).

So, figuring 500GB drives the nice solution comes out to about $2300  
and the klunky about $1700.  I've benched e.SATA at about 30% faster  
than USB2 in real-world use, so it's right on the price/performance  
curve nicely.  Rackmount is also valuable and the kernel deals with  
SATA better than USB (RAID auto-assembly, etc.).

So, doing it 'right' isn't hard to justify if performance or density  
is more important than price.

Thanks for making me look. :)

-Bill

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