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Re: More than 2 SATA Drives with X5000

Posted: Sat Dec 24, 2016 3:14 am
by amigasociety
I had this buried in my last message so figured I would ask here...

Everyone else, your SATA Card, do any of you use a PCI SATA Card that has external SATA ports too?

I see some that offer 2 internal and 2 external SATA ports. Not sure if that means I could in theory have 2 more SATA ports inside going to internal drives and then use the external SATA ports for high speed external drives, say for backup drive or something.

TJ

Re: More than 2 SATA Drives with X5000

Posted: Sat Dec 24, 2016 10:25 am
by tonyw
Unless they are eSATA connectors (with built-in power), you would have to provide SATA power to the external drives as well.

We don't have any (working) support for hot-plugging yet, so you won't gain much.

Re: More than 2 SATA Drives with X5000

Posted: Sun Dec 25, 2016 3:08 am
by nbache
Also, IIRC the cards offering two internal and two external ports actually only have two units in total, it's just that you can select to use either internal or external for each of them.

This may not be true for all such cards, but at least that's what I remember seeing, so at least check that before investing.

Best regards,

Niels

Re: More than 2 SATA Drives with X5000

Posted: Sun Jul 16, 2017 5:16 am
by daveyw
Today I tried adding a third SATA drive to my X5000 (onboard is populated with DVD and SSD). I'm using a 3112 card I have had installed since I built the machine in May, but have only just connected a drive to it now.

The drive was a Western Digital Blue 2TB (purchased yesterday). I prepped the drive in my A1XE, so it's been created with 2 SFS/02 partitions. The 1st is 500 GB, the second is 350 GB.

The reasult is disappointing. The drive seems slow to access, especially upon the frist read. After a minute of browsing the contents with Filer, I get a lock-up.

I will try and experiment with creating an NGF paritition, and check my connections, but so far looks flaky. I'm not sure SFS is the culprit, I have been using SFS external HDDs and flash drives with no major problems.

Re: More than 2 SATA Drives with X5000

Posted: Mon Jul 17, 2017 5:48 am
by daveyw
Looks like it was just a loose connection. Dang, those SATA cables with clips are actually pretty useless... :roll:

Re: More than 2 SATA Drives with X5000

Posted: Mon Jul 17, 2017 10:22 am
by tonyw
Yeah, they're bloody awful. Hope someone designs a better clamp soon.

Of course, the designers of SATA didn't expect the cables to be ever be removed, just plugged in once and last for the life of the PC.