> From: Saso Kiselkov [mailto:skiselkov...@gmail.com] > > Nope, SATA does have port multipliers, though I agree that beyond a certain > point it becomes a mess.
Now that you mention it, when I look around, everything that I find called a SATA port multiplier is some sort of add-on card that takes an upstream SATA port and gives you several downstream SATA ports. I don't see the point. If you have room for an add-on card, I would think, it would make more sense to just add another SATA adapter to the PCIe bus. The main point is, a port multiplier might be useful if it's *outside* your system. Supposing you have an external enclosure that holds 4 drives or something like that... You might say, "I have SATA 6Gbit bus which is good enough for the 4 drives in that enclosure." And I would tend to agree, if they let you run a single 6Gbit SATA cable to the enclosure and then internally they use a SATA port multiplier, that would be pretty nice. But when I look around, I don't see any 4-drive enclosures that use a single upstream 6Gbit ESATA bus... I see enclosures with 4 bays, and 4 ESATA ports. One for each drive. By comparison, the same exact class of products certainly exist, with 4 drives (or even 16 or 24) on a single SAS (Mini-SAS, SFF-8088) cable. Internally, the enclosures have SAS Expander to fanout to the drives. _______________________________________________ OpenIndiana-discuss mailing list OpenIndiana-discuss@openindiana.org http://openindiana.org/mailman/listinfo/openindiana-discuss
