SATA problem

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Tue, Apr 05, 2011 at 04:37:24PM -0400, Christopher Browne wrote:
> Very interesting array device.  Entertainingly, I have two spare eSATA
> ports from that card you suggested, so it would certainly be plausible
> to hook up something like this in addition to the two drives I already
> added.
> 
> Some things not clear from the product...
> - It seems like it only gives 1 "line" into one's eSATA bus.  Does
> that lose you bandwidth, or does that perhaps not much matter?

3Gbps is quite a bit of bandwidth for 4 drives.  For SSDs it would be
a major limitation.

> - This device "cooks up" the RAID volumes for you?  Or can you access
> them as individual drives?  (Actually, found the answer to that: No...
>  <http://forum.mediasonic.ca/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=321&p=1512&hilit=SU3S2#p1512>)

Yeah the raid version is raid only.  The cheaper boxes show indivudual
disks only (but require the eSata port to support port multipliers).

> This is something of a "strike against," as it means my data is
> somewhat "held hostage" by the device.

Well that's true of ANY raid design that isn't purely software pretty
much.

> - It looks like it can be configured without needing particular
> software on the host that's to connect with it, right?

Yep, hit a couple of buttons and it is done.  There is no software to
worry about.

> I see an 8-bay unit that's coming Real Soon Now, which looks quite
> interesting too.  Same inherent problems, of course.

Of course.

> Reinstall not an issue; I'm using the space assortedly:
> a) To play around with new filesystems
> b) Bulk storage of noncritical material
> 
> If it happens to blow chunks, that won't enormously trouble me.

I hate loosing anything I spent any time on no matter how irrelevant.

> It's tempting to consider the Mediasonic device, replete with drives,
> and at least the "n+1" protection against failure of RAID 5.

RAID 5 is very nice, especially with dedicated hardware to handle it.

-- 
Len Sorensen
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