SATA, eSATA, Port Multiplying and RAID

["noughtomate" <balraj_jassal@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

I have various standalone USB and Firewire Hard drives lying about
but now Node Zero has become abit of a mess, so I'm looking at a
rack mount chassis for my primary Media Server. This will be a
standalone rackmount PC which I'm quite comfortable with building.

However, I want to build it for growth and need to consider a
seperate multi Drive rack to sit alongside it sometime in the
future. I've been inspired by this Silverstone DS351 kit
(http://tinyurl.com/4dt5uj with a good
Video  review [7 mins] here
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Ie6iRXCKGA).

The problem with this device however is that it requires the
controlling PC motherboard to have a Sil3132 Chip set, which my
motherboard doesn't support.
Sure, I can upgrade my motherboard in the future, but it begs the
questions - how is SATA meant to be muliplied ?

I read many moons ago that as great as SATA is for throughput, it
does not lend itself well to port multiplying and normally should be
use in a 1 physicial interface : 1 HDD arrangement (correct me if
I'm wrong).  Recently, I've been reading about something called SATA
Backpanes which confused me further and it just made me think how  I
could build my own HDD Chassis.

So my questions :
- How is SATA meant to be used ? Can a single motherboard
connection (whether SATA or eSATA) control multiple Hard drives ?

- Although eSATA is external, how is it different from SATA ? Can
what what I do with SATA be done with eSATA ? (Aside from power
requirements)

- If I wanted to build a HDD server to be connected to my PC's
eSATA connector, what kind of board do I need ? Is there any such
thing as a standalone PCB (which fits ATX/MicroATX/MiniATX etc..
size) which can perform the backpane / port multiplying / RAID
function ?

- Does any form port propogation allow for varying size /
manufacture disks in a JBOD configuration ? The emphasis seems to be
RAID which I expect would require identical disks.

- Do any of my above questions have to be chipset dependent ?

Yes I am confused!
Any advice would be much appreciated.

Thanks


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