I want to be sure I understand this correctly.  My motherboard has 5 regular sata ports and 1 esata port.  I am using all 5 of the regular sata ports, and I will soon need to add another drive. 

 

Up until recently, my plan when this happened was to just use an esata to sata adapter, and only connect a single drive to it.  Then subsequent to that I was going to go down the road of plug-in pci-e cards. 

 

There has been discussion in some other threads recently about using the esata port, connected to a hardware raid controller and using that to make a Raid1 or Raid0 cache drive.  I didn't think that unraid worked this way.  I thought that it would see the drives as individual drives regardless of the controllers raid setting.  Would this only work for cache?  Could you make a data drive this way?  1 thread talked about setting up the parity drive this way. 

 

One of my early experiments with unraid involved an old Promise TX2 pci - ide raid controller.  To my knowledge this card is a hardware controller and not a software controller.  Regardless of whether I set the card to Raid1 or Raid0, unraid always saw both drives as individual drives.  It never saw them as a single entity. 

 

Does the hardware raid controller connected to the esata port work because there is something special about the esata port as opposed to a pci slot raid controllers?   If thats the case, is this difference something fundamental to Unraid?  Or is it something that could change in future versions?  How about linux in general?  Is it a driver issue?  Cause it would seem to me that for the pci card to work properly, unraid would have to know how to use it properly, via a driver.  With the esata port, is it not using a driver(other than the sata driver in the kernel that is), and just sort of trusing what it sees? (so to speak)  Rather than trying to interpret it?  If that makes sense?

Can you post the reads mentioned so the answer is in context with them.

Let me rephrase the question.  I think I'm looking for a more basic answer than you think. 

 

I have read thread where people talk about using hardware raid controllers to make their Parity or Cache drives raid 1 or raid 0.  I have had the personal experience of using a hardware raid controller, where the drives were in an array, and unraid still saw them as seperate drives.  Was that a fluke?  Should unraid have seen them as 1 drive?  This was a pci card, does using a hardware raid controller behind an esata port change the rules somehow?  Will it see it as 1 drive behind an esata port, and not a pci card?

It depends on the card and the hardware.

If the card is using a pseudo software raid driver (most low cost cards do) then unRAID will see the drives as single drives.

If you are using a raid controller that is truly hardware raid, 3ware for example, then unRAID will see an array as oine drive.

As long as the drivers for the hardware raid controller are compiled into the kernel.

 

In one case I used an eSATA port to connect with a Silcon image raid controller.

This unit provided a series of different raid personalities without drivers from the operating system.

In this case unRAID saw the array as one drive.

With portmultiplier support on a SIL3132 and a SAFE50 and SAFE33 arrangement in the hardware raid, unRAID saw two drives.

1 a 33% raid 1 drive, 2 a 66% join'ed(concatonated) big drive.

I used this for Cache and Parity. It worked.