Dear All,

I have a N54L HP micro-server, I have filled all of the bays and wanted to expand the number of disks. Would an external ESATA 4 bay JBOD storage tower be compatible with unraid and allow the JBOD disks to be added to array as normal?

 

i was trying a usb external 2tb drive and i couldnt add that in only as unassigned devices

 

thinking of this:

http://www.mwave.com.au/product/icy-box-ib3640su3-external-4bay-jbod-system-for-35-inch-sata-hdds-ab57028

thanks in advance

 

 

I haven't tested myself, but port multiplier is supposed to work using the hacked bios, note however that parity checks and disk rebuilds would slow down a lot, I would guess ~60MB/s with 4 disks on esata.

I haven't tested myself, but port multiplier is supposed to work using the hacked bios, note however that parity checks and disk rebuilds would slow down a lot, I would guess ~60MB/s with 4 disks on esata.

Thanks for the reply, are you referring to the N54L hacked bios regarding the unlocking of the onboard SATA ports. My understanding was that this simply enabled full sata 2 speed on the port and changes the ESATA to SATA.

http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=11585.0

changing from esata to sata would be the reverse of what im after as the external disk tower above used Esata port multiplier?

The original BIOS is configured to combine the last 2 SATA ports with IDE, you need to turn this off, afaik only way to do this is to get the hacked BIOS and turn that option off, so that the esata port operates in AHCI mode, port multiplier won't work in IDE mode.

The original BIOS is configured to combine the last 2 SATA ports with IDE, you need to turn this off, afaik only way to do this is to get the hacked BIOS and turn that option off, so that the esata port operates in AHCI mode, port multiplier won't work in IDE mode.

sweet so providing ACHI is enabled it should be detected and work in unraid, the only limitation being is the slower disk speeds, they are multiplexed via 1 ESATA port for the 4 disk tower drives.

 

Yes, with AHCI enable it should work with the speed limitation, at least I remember reading that it does on other forums.