E-SATA hub? Help

[Deleted member 4644]

So I have an ASUS 650i board with SATA.

I have run out of ports and PCIE slots

I was wondering if it is possible to run an ESATA cable out of my case (my case has an ESATA port) and run that to an ESATA hub and then use external drives?

Thanks for any info you can provide.

 

[Slugbait]

You mean like this unit? It's $100. If you want RAID support, this one costs $138.

 

[Deleted member 4644]

Anyone else know anything about this stuff? Are these things reliable?

 

[MerlinRML]

SATA Port Multiplier is not quite so simple as plug it in and watch it work. It has been rediculously slow to catch on with any of the chipset manufacturers. You have to check and see if your nvidia southbridge supports it in order for that hub to work, otherwise you will only ever see one additional drive. Almost every port multiplier solution I've seen has used a silicon image host controller and a port multiplier chip on the storage enclosure. This hub solution lacks the host controller, but it does abstract the port multiplier chip out of the enclosure.

I'm not overly familiar with nvidia chipsets, so I couldn't say for sure, but if they don't support port multiplier, you are stuck with adding a controller for which you've said you have no spare PCIe expansion slots. No good.

This solution is interesting because it allows for incremental growth by adding one-off enclosures. No need to buy a large enclosure up front.

 

[JackMDS]

Much cheaper and more reliable to put PCI eSATA card.

 

[Blain]

Originally posted by: Slugbait
You mean like this unit? It's $100.

They would sell many more of these units if they only used Vince from ShamWow...
"Are you following me camera guy?" :laugh: