Re: external drive enclosures / esata / port multipliers?

[Camaleón <noelamac@gmail.com>]

On Mon, 17 Jan 2011 15:32:51 -0800, Monte Milanuk wrote:

(...)

> My big question is... most of these external drive boxes seem to claim
> support for JBOD, RAID 0, 1, 10, 5, etc. - should I presume that is
> simply fake RAID like many commodity mobos have, and not really usable
> in Linux? In that case, with all the drives hanging off the one eSATA
> connection, will Linux (specifically Debian Squeeze) see all four
> drives, or just the first one? Will I be able to configure them in a
> RAID5 array as desired?

I would take a closely look on each enclosure specs because there can be 
many differences between them.

(a quick Google search provides some interesting results on this matter)

http://www.google.com/search?sclient=psy&hl=en&complete=0&site=webhp&source=hp&q=esata+por+multiplier+enclosure&btnG=Search

OTOH, you can also review this page where there are many sata chipsets 
listed along with their PMP capabilities:

https://ata.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/SATA_hardware_features

But again, nothing prevents the manufacturer from disabling such option 
in the device firmware :-/

Greetings,

-- 
Camaleón