I currently have a AMS Venus T5 external enclosure which is an eSATA enclosure with Sil4726. It came with Sil3132 for host controller. I use it for software RAID5 on Linux for storing documents, music, junk, etc. I noticed that when I boot my server, the first drive only shows up in the BIOS. Meaning, there needs to be driver support in order to see all the drives and use RAID. It got me thinking about using an external enclosure with USB as the access method. My question is - does anyone have any experience with multi-drive enclosures with USB? And how are the drives presented to the PC? Would each drive be seen without any driver? Reason I ask is: I'm in the process of building a ESXi whitebox and the 3132 SATA card isn't supported in ESXi. So basically, I can't use the 3132. I couldn't find any inexpensive eSATA controllers that support port multipliers. So I was thinking that USB storage support would be the least common denominator and could possibly use an external enclosure with USB. I don't need a lot of throughput - I literally use it for lite storage. I use it on a 100Mb network anyways so the 480Mbps USB2 would be more than OK. Thoughts? -- -tim -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-raid" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
