Hi all
Thank you for taking the time to read this and hopefully lend me your expertise. I recently discovered this great application that does exactly what I have been looking for and since then have been putting together a plan to migrate from my ageing HP N54L Microserver running unRAID to something else.
I have a gaming rig/HTPC that sits under the stairs and is more than powerful enough to handle anything I throw at it. It sits idle 95% of the time and is always on so I was wanting to consolidate the Microserver and this rig into one. The motherboard in the HTPC is an MSI Z97i Gaming AC which has 2 x eSata ports. I am trying to find out if these support port multipliers or not. I have read on a forum that NO Intel Sata supports PM but I have not seen anything concrete on this so I am hoping you guys can clarify.
Takes me to my next point. If it doesn't I will need an add-in card. Seen one or two but they seem to support a max of 5 drives per port? The specification seems to support up to 15 disks, I only need 8!
The reason I need 8 is because I plan on using an IcyBox IB-3680SU3. This supports 8 disks via either USB3.0 or eSata. It only has a single eSata port so if I want to address all 8 disks I need a port capable of doing so. I have read on these forums that USB3.0 is not the way to go for long term storage and which is why I am looking at eSata instead. Does anyone have experience with this unit, good or bad?
Anyway, that's my chain of thought pretty much written down. Look forward to hearing your thoughts 