On Oct 28, 2006, at 10:49 AM, Peter Eisch wrote:
> For work I just bought a large chassis filled with SATA drives to  
> use as a
> backup spooler/NAS.  I have this e450 sitting here and while I  
> can't use its
> MP features, it would seem to have sufficient power to spin up a  
> pile of
> drives.  So I got to wondering if I put in a 3ware SATA-R  
> controller and
> cabled up an array of drives...  No, there wouldn't be a hot-swap  
> planar and
> I'd probably have to make power cords for the drives.
>
> Has anyone done such a thing already?  What other things would  
> limit the
> effectiveness of a system configured like this?  There's no BIOS  
> for the
> cards to get configured, anything else?

   Heh...I think most people would consider the presence of a "BIOS"  
to be a big limitation on effectiveness.

   I once took a bunch of measurements with the intention of making a  
replacement E450 disk backplane for FibreChannel drives.  I never got  
around to doing it, but it'd certainly be practical to do.  The same  
could be done for SATA, though it'd be a bit more involved due to  
SATA's single drive per port requirement.

               -Dave

-- 
Dave McGuire
Cape Coral, FL