eSATA harddisk

[bkv]

Hi, I have a eSata Sheva Multi booting Ubuntu from the SD card. I already have an usb disk attached, bu now I want to buy an eSata disk for my plug.
Are there any compatiblity issues I need to be aware of? Will all such disks work? I do not plan to boot the plug from the hard drive.

I am thinking of an 1TB disk from Verbatim.

Regards,
Bjorn

[NewIT_Marcus]

We haven't failed with any of the eSATA drives that we have tried.

Having said that, I think that all the drives I have used have been WD "Green" drives. I have used both 1T and 2T.

[bkv]

We haven't failed with any of the eSATA drives that we have tried.

Having said that, I think that all the drives I have used have been WD "Green" drives. I have used both 1T and 2T.

Hi Marcus.

Have you tried using an "internal" SATA drive in an enclosure or a docking station with eSATA interface?


Regards,
Bjorn

[MatteoBP]

Hi.
I'm using without any problem an "internal" SATA drive in an enclosure powered by external 12V/5V AC/DC adapter, connected to the eSata Sheva Multi booting  with an eSata-SATA cable.

MatteoBP

[NewIT_Marcus]

We haven't failed with any of the eSATA drives that we have tried.

Having said that, I think that all the drives I have used have been WD "Green" drives. I have used both 1T and 2T.

Hi Marcus.

Have you tried using an "internal" SATA drive in an enclosure or a docking station with eSATA interface?


Regards,
Bjorn

We use "internal" SATA drives in docking stations, and the eSATA interface. (The USB interface on the docking station works perfectly too, but that's not the object under investigation here).

[Andrew]

Brought a multi-boot (black) esata Sheevaplug mid march 2010.
Debian   Kernel  2.6.32.7   the one supplied by Newit on an SD card

Up till recently I was using an old USB drive, but I decided 'upgrade' to using the esata port.

Brought one of these enclosures
http://www.byteccusa.com/product/enclosure/BT-M251/BT-M251.htm
with two of these WD drives
http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.asp?driveid=804

Internally the enclosure contains a SIL5744 with sata port multipliers.
http://www.siliconimage.com/products/product.aspx?pid=105
I believe the kernel support for port multiplier hardware is limited so watch this.

I have mine configured to see the two drives as individual drives off the one esata port. I have not played with the RAID functions or the USB port on the enclosure. All seem to to work 'out of the box' using the NEWIT image (I glad someone understands linux!!).
All that was needed was FDISK (remember to start your partitions on a 4k boundary with these new 'advanced format' drives) and some entries in /etc/fstab

The drives spin down after 10 minutes automatically and spin up without error logs automatically.
Manual hdparm standby command line caused an instantaneous spindown. I could never get my usb connected drives to spin down. Esata of course also seems faster, but as i am running only a 100Mb/s network, this is less of an issue for me.

My dmesg startup is below.

So all in all a very positive experience with my Newit Esata plug. Bjorn, it seems like you just need to have a go..  good luck.

Andrew...

----------------------------


ata2: SATA link up 3.0 Gbps (SStatus 123 SControl F300)
ata2.15: Port Multiplier 1.1, 0x1095:0x5744 r33, 3 ports, feat 0x1/0x9
ata2.00: hard resetting link
ata2.01: hard resetting link
ata2.02: hard resetting link
ata2.00: ATA-8: WDC WD6400BPVT-00HXZT0, 01.01A01, max UDMA/133
ata2.00: 1250263728 sectors, multi 0: LBA48 NCQ (depth 31/32)
ata2.00: configured for UDMA/133
ata2.01: ATA-8: WDC WD6400BPVT-00HXZT1, 01.01A01, max UDMA/133
ata2.01: 1250263728 sectors, multi 0: LBA48 NCQ (depth 31/32)
ata2.01: configured for UDMA/133
ata2: EH complete
scsi 1:0:0:0: Direct-Access     ATA      WDC WD6400BPVT-0 01.0 PQ: 0 ANSI: 5
sd 1:0:0:0: [sda] 1250263728 512-byte logical blocks: (640 GB/596 GiB)
sd 1:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg0 type 0
scsi 1:1:0:0: Direct-Access     ATA      WDC WD6400BPVT-0 01.0 PQ: 0 ANSI: 5
sd 1:0:0:0: [sda] Write Protect is off
sd 1:0:0:0: [sda] Mode Sense: 00 3a 00 00
sd 1:0:0:0: [sda] Write cache: enabled, read cache: enabled, doesn't support DPO or FUA
sd 1:1:0:0: [sdb] 1250263728 512-byte logical blocks: (640 GB/596 GiB)
sd 1:1:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg1 type 0
 sda:
sd 1:1:0:0: [sdb] Write Protect is off
sd 1:1:0:0: [sdb] Mode Sense: 00 3a 00 00
sd 1:1:0:0: [sdb] Write cache: enabled, read cache: enabled, doesn't support DPO or FUA
 sdb: sda1
sd 1:0:0:0: [sda] Attached SCSI disk
 sdb1
sd 1:1:0:0: [sdb] Attached SCSI disk

[bkv]

Thank you for your replies!
-Bjorn