[nycbug-talk] cheap way to add drives to a 1U?

[Pete Wright]

On Wed, Oct 28, 2009 at 11:15:36PM -0400, Charles Sprickman wrote:
> On Wed, 28 Oct 2009, Pete Wright wrote:
> 
> >On Wed, Oct 28, 2009 at 07:08:45PM -0400, Charles Sprickman wrote:
> >>Any ideas?
> >>
> >>I've got a 1U server available that has two SATA drive bays.  I need at
> >>least four drives...
> >>
> >>Any cheap way to bundle 2-4 drives in some kind of external case and bring
> >>them back via eSATA or an SATA multilane cable?
> >>
> >
> >hey charles - i've used these guys in the past to build some relativly
> >cheap fast storage for some video playback systems:
> >http://www.pc-pitstop.com/sata_enclosures/
> 
> Wow.  One-stop shopping.  This seems like a decent enough deal:
> 
> http://www.pc-pitstop.com/sata_enclosures/scsat44xb.asp
> 
> Their drive prices are really good, actually a bit lower than NewEgg on 
> the WD RE3s.
> 

yea we were pretty happy with the prices and didn't have issues with
product once we got stuff.

> 
> What host adapters are you using on the FBSD boxes?  Some time ago I was 
> cautioned against basically all Highpoint and SIIS cards on -stable.  It's 
> pretty slim pickings once you take those brands out of the mix.
> 

on my workstation I've just installed this controller:
02:08.0 Mass storage controller: Promise Technology, Inc. PDC40718 (SATA
300 TX4) (rev 02)

Its been working like a charm.  This is on a dodgy Dell XPS desktop
system which an awful Nvidia sata "raid" controller.  fbsd didn't like
that at all - once i installed the promise card everything was happy.
got it from macmall - and seems to work ok for r&d purposes:

http://www.macmall.com/p/product~dpno~564769~pdp.dabgfii

with this controller what you can do is buy one of the
internal<->external sata adapters from pc-pitstop or somewhere to
connect your shoebox or external jbod.

HTH!
-pete