kharan5876

I'm using the LSI 8801E host bus adapter, chenbro ck13601 sas expander and the norco 4020 chassis. It's all working just fine for me now. If I ever wanted to expand I would just have to buy another norco and ck13601.

I used to use esata a long time ago and have bad memories. For one the cables would keep falling out of the external enclosure I was using. There was no locking mechanism. Second, the eSata card I was using actually died while I was adding a drive to a raid5 array, thus corrupting the whole thing and I lost everything.

I've been fighting the affordable home storage solution war for years and I think with SAS its finally over. It's scalable, fast, supported on all OS (try sata port multiplier support on freebsd or solaris.. they have been "working on it" for years, i.e. its never gonna happen), and finally SAS just plug and play works.

Regarding your post on using LSI SAS controllers in conjunction with Port Multiplier enclosures...did you ever try this?

I currently have about 40TB to storage using eSata controllers and 5-drive Venus T5 esata controllers...it sorta works though I have a lot of problems getting all the drives to be detected all the time. Plus this solution is only so scalable...eventually you run out of PCI and/or PCIe slots...I've been curious if I could switch to a SAS controller (requires just one motherboard slot) and then start injecting SAS expanders...this should allow 128 or even 256 drives.

It would be nice if you could use the eSata enclosures as they are inexpensive (~$200/each) and take up a heck of a lot less space than some 3U or 4U enclosure.

email me if you want to discuss as I don't really participate on this forum.

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