Hi guys.

 

I am looking at poss using a Sans Digital external 5 bay enclosure with my unRaid setup.

 

This device comes with a eSATA card but would this device work with a eSATA to SATA cable plugged in to the motherboard?

 

Thanks in advance

It depends, your motherboard must support port multipliers and the driver must be in unRAID. Many Intel chipsets claim to support port multipliers, but SIL is the recommended solution. The following is from Backblaze:

 

A note about SATA chipsets: Each of the port multiplier backplanes has a Silicon Image SiI3726 chip so that five drives can be attached to one SATA port. Each of the SYBA two-port PCIe SATA cards has a Silicon Image SiI3132, and the four-port PCI Addonics card has a Silicon Image SiI3124 chip. We use only three of the four available ports on the Addonics card because we have only nine backplanes. We don’t use the SATA ports on the motherboard because, despite Intel’s claims of port multiplier support in their ICH10 south bridge, we noticed strange results in our performance tests. Silicon Image pioneered port multiplier technology, and their chips work best together.

 

http://blog.backblaze.com/2009/09/01/petabytes-on-a-budget-how-to-build-cheap-cloud-storage/