i'm planning on setting up an HTPC with a 4-drive RAID5 via a PCIe x4 card. i want the PC itself to be in a nice, small case, and to be as cool/quiet as possible. for this reason, i think my best option is to house the drives in a seperate enclosure. i've been thinking about using multilane SATA to connect the enclosure to the PC ( http://www.addonics.com/products/multilane ). this way i can have the enclosure with the drives somewhere behind the main tv setup and out of sight, and have just 1 cable connecting the 4 drives as if they were inside the PC.
here's where my question actually starts to form.
the SATA standard allows for a maximum cable length of 1m. eSATA is allowed to run for 2m. the two have different voltages, i believe, correct? at the same time, i've seen PCI brackets with an eSATA connector on one side and a regular SATA cable on the other... presumably to allow you to use one of your internal SATA ports to connect an eSATA drive. am i right to assume that an eSATA port created in this way isn't really a true eSATA port, and is still limited to the 1m cable length of SATA before you run into signal degradation? as such, does this mean that if i use multilane SATA, i'll be limited to 1m of cable? or rather, even less, since 6" of SATA cabling in the enclosure and another 6" in the PC cuts the length down from 3ft (1m) to 2ft?
here's where my question actually starts to form.
the SATA standard allows for a maximum cable length of 1m. eSATA is allowed to run for 2m. the two have different voltages, i believe, correct? at the same time, i've seen PCI brackets with an eSATA connector on one side and a regular SATA cable on the other... presumably to allow you to use one of your internal SATA ports to connect an eSATA drive. am i right to assume that an eSATA port created in this way isn't really a true eSATA port, and is still limited to the 1m cable length of SATA before you run into signal degradation? as such, does this mean that if i use multilane SATA, i'll be limited to 1m of cable? or rather, even less, since 6" of SATA cabling in the enclosure and another 6" in the PC cuts the length down from 3ft (1m) to 2ft?
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