I have inherited a brand new pc from a friend and have a question about sata. The mobo has only one pci-e slot and that is being blocked by the video card. I need a connection to my external hdd enclosure. The mobo has a single free esata port and a couple of free sata ports. So what I beleive I need is something like, or similar to, this Click Here. But I am not sure if I must plug it into the esata port or a sata port of the mobo Or if it makes a difference. Thoughts??
JorgeM 966
I could be mistaken but it shouldnt matter. SATA and eSATA are the same except eSATA designates that you are taking the SATA connection externally, so typically one would use an eSATA cable which is shielded.
Thanks so much. That's what I needed, a short and to the point answer.
rubberman 1,355
Most sata/esata controllers can handle multiple devices over one connection. I do that by connecting multi-disc carriers (4 discs each) to a single port. I can configure them as JBOD (Just A Bunch of Discs), or LVM volumes, or RAID arrays. So, get a multi-disc carrier (StarTech has some good ones), plug it into the single eSata port, and enjoy your newly discovered disc capacity! All you have to do then is buy the discs... :-)
FWIW, I run Linux on my system with these arrays, but Windows should handle such devices just fine. Here is a link to their disc enclosure page: http://www.startech.com/HDD/Enclosures/
