[OpenIndiana-discuss] Expanding storage with JBOD

[Edward Ned Harvey (openindiana)]

> From: Hans J Albertsson [mailto:hans.j.albertsson at branneriet.se]
> Sent: Tuesday, January 7, 2014 5:01 AM
> 
> I thought that might be what you were talking about, but I wanted to be
> sure.
> Shelf, fix icy box and PS, short pins by clips-and-wire and add som isolation
> for safe op?
> Can you suggest a cheap and commonly available sata pci card that can work
> in an X7BSi mb based computer?

This has been a long thread, that has confused me a bit.  Can you remind us what you're trying to do?

Since I'm currently doing this, and learned the hard way, I'd like to inform you:

Suppose you have a computer chassis, with enough internal SATA ports, but not enough internal space to hold drives.  So you want to add external drives.  So you dangle a SATA cable out the computer, and you want to power an external drive using an external ATX power supply.  (This is what I did).

Then you short the pins, as Saso suggested, in order to get the ATX power supply to turn on.  BUT you MUST connect the external ATX ground to the computer ground.  Simply sharing the common ground pin on your wall outlet isn't enough.  (I fried two of my hard drives.  That's how I learned the hard way.)  The easiest way is to simply take out one of the screws of the ATX power supply, put an eyelet tipped wire there (with the screw put back in obviously) and connect the other end of the wire to the computer chassis.  Just wire the two chassis' together.

If you look at an ESATA cable, it's exactly the same as the SATA cable, except that it includes an external ground connector.  If you buy something like a Sans Digital (I like the brand) ESATA external enclosure connected via ESATA, then the ESATA cable guarantees the external chassis and internal chassis will share the common ground.

If all you want to add is a couple (up to maybe 4) drives, then SATA works fine.  Beyond that point, SAS becomes the obvious better solution.  Because in SATA, you have to run a separate cable for every drive.  While in SAS, you get 24 Gbit in a single cable.  (4 channels of shared 6Gbit)