Booting From eSATA Port. Possible?

I'm thinking about buying one of these with 4 x 1TB Samsung F1s in RAID 5

Just wanted to double check that I can boot from the eSATA port. I've checked the BIOS startup entries and I assume 'PCI SCSI' (when the RAID controller isn't activated) is the eSATA port? I would definitely want to boot from it so I can take full advantage of raided 3.5" 7200rpm desktop drives on my laptop.

 

< sits back and watch >

 

Along with everyone else by the looks of it!

Just been thinking some more about this - I'm not quite sure how a raid device would be seen by the OS when connected over eSATA. Would it be transparent or would the OS require RAID drivers - I assume transparent.

Also, could someone that has an eSATA enclosure knocking around just try and boot from it for me.

 

There's one potential pitfall to your idea.

The controller that that enclosure comes with more than likely supports port multiplication - I'm rather sure the port on our laptops doesn't. The good news is, there *are* ExpressCard eSATA controllers that do, and they're not prohibitively expensive, either.

I'd make very sure that store has a return policy before pulling the trigger.

 

You're right it does use port multiplication, good point. Why do you think our integrated eSATA port doesn't support PM?

Actually I wonder if it uses PM when in RAID mode as it may present just a single drive to the eSATA port in that case. Do you think PM only comes in to play when you are running each drive individually in non-RAID mode?

 

Ok looks like the Silicon Image controller in the P-6831 FX does support PM: SiI3531

So that's one hurdle out the way hopefully.

 

Ok update time. I've found the US equivalent of the EdgeStore DAS401 and it's called the MicroNet SR4. Some users state that RAID 5 performance is not so good. RAID 10 would give much better performance but I would have to give half of my total capacity away for redundancy (2TB usable out of 4TB) - no thanks.

So I have found another eSATA enclosure called the Sumvision TB32 which looks pretty good. US equivalent and a full review here Mapower MAP-TB32. There are full benchmarks in the review, the best of which is the RAID 0 over eSATA result - this is hopefully how I will setup and use the enclosure. These benchmarks are running 2 x Seagate 250GB drives so results should be even better with 2 x Samsung F1's. Should give an incredible overall speed boost to my lappy

There is also another issue and that's the length of eSATA cable. The theoretical limit is 2m and you can buy 2m eSATA cables. I need a full 2m due to my AV setup. The problem comes with the extra distance the signals have to travel inside the laptop and enclosure. I've read that these distances have to be included in the 2m maximum. So I need a 1.9m cable - not going to happen. I think I'll risk it with 2m and see how it goes.

 

The ICH9M chip would be your point of termination. It *should* work. But again, I'd be very sure these places had return policies.

 

Didn't syngen build an external eSATA?

 

I'll move this to the Hardware forum. You might get more responses there.

 

I have booted my Dell E6400 from a HDD connected to the eSATA power (easy way to check if a cloned HDD is booting OK). In my case I needed to press F12 to get the boot device menu and then the external HDD showed up as if it was a second internal HDD.

John

 

Ok another update.

I can't boot from my eSATA port. In actual fact the eSATA enclosure is not visible at all at boot. If I load the SiI 3531 SATA Controller driver at the Windows setup drive selection stage it finds the enclosure and I can install Windows onto it but setup gives me a warning that it wont work as the eSATA drive controller is not available in the BIOS. Even if I have a drive which is visible at boot (e.g. SATA) with the Vista boot files it can't continue the setup process as the eSATA enclosure is not visible.

Absolutely gutted. Why would Gateway not give an option to boot from the integrated eSATA port? Seems ridiculous to me, especially being that the eSATA port provides the fastest connection for an external drive.

Back to the drawing board, will probably revert to a FreeNAS box now.

 

You might be chasing rainbows looking at raid. If your bios doesn't support any bootable external interfaces, see if they make a hard disk drive ultra bay slim adapter for your laptop. This would slide in place of your dvd which you could then easily connect to any of your peripheral ports. Pretty sure they can be made to dual boot. There may be some adapters around too. Look into it.

.

 

It supports booting via all the external interfaces, apart from the eSATA port. The drive bay idea is good although SATA would be no good for me due to it's reduced signal strength (compared to eSATA) and the 1m cable length limit.

I think I'm just going to have to admit defeat on this one. It's a shame though as I was looking forward to the performance benefits and extra capacity when using raided desktop HDs.