SATA Port Multipliers in FreeBSD (6.3)

[Christopher Key]

Graeme Dargie wrote:
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Elliot Finley [mailto:efinleywork at efinley.com] 
> Why not just upgrade to 7-Stable and then use these:
>
> http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16815121009
>
> they cost less than port multipliers.  They don't do RAID, but then if 
> you're on 7-Stable, you can use ZFS zraid.
>
>
>   

> In then end I trumped for a new motherboard with 6 sata ports on it and
> it is running 6 x 500gb drives in a ZFS array just perfectly.
>
> Regards
>
> Graeme
>
>   
Thanks all,

I probably should have given a little more background.  My current setup 
involves a 6xSATA port motherboard, with 5 media storage drives in a 
http://www.icydock.com/product/mb455spf.html.  2x500Gb gmirrored for 
music, photos and homedirs; 3x1Gb with indepdent filesystems overlayed 
using symlinks for dvds.  There isn't really any space in left in the 
case for many external drives, and certainly not to make them externally 
available, hence I was looking at external storage solutions.

There's one PCIe x16 port,and one PCIe x1 port, and I don't think that 
an additional 8 drives will prove sufficient in the long term, hence the 
use of port multipliers quite appealed, giving me a potential total of 
20 drives.  I would probably go for something like, 
http://www.starmount.co.uk/productversion/591.html, with 4x the 
aforementioned devices installed, and unless I'm missing something, the 
port multipliers themselves seem quite cheap: 
http://www.scan.co.uk/products/Lycom-ST-126RM-SATA-II-3Gbps-1-To-5-Port-Multiplier-bridge-board-(for-Rack-Mount).

I was always intending to use software raid, although I've yet to decide 
over ZFS, or multiple graid5s (groups of 5 disks) gconcated together as 
I buy additional sets of disks.  If sufficiently stable, ZFS does quite 
appeal.

Regards,

Chris