The Intel ICH10R (as used in the R210 R310 R410 R510) does support SATA port multipliers (in which case I'd suggest a simple header to bring the motherboard SATA out to the back-panel), but the R610 seems to use the ICH9, which doesn't. The Intel ICH are very good SATA chips, and will get you a very high throughput, but as Silicon Image make most of the port multiplier chips, they may have better compatibility.
The Sil3132s work well, but have somewhat limited throughput (300M per second each I think), but this may not be an issue to you depending on your application. The Sil3124s may be a bit better they are 4 port chips, and although this is a PCI-X chipset you can find implementations which put them behind a PCIe to PCIX bridge chip - have a look on ebay or elsewhere, they are around $70 or so, I think. It looks like the card you found is one of those (3124 + pcie bridge), although the fan+HS on it looks like a load of BS to me (it's on the PCI bridge chip unless I'm mistaken - and is almost certainly there to make it look "cool" only), and the price is very high.. You can find more detailed info including port multiplier (PM) support here: https://ata.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Hardware,_driver_status Also ask on the linux-ide mailing list... > I'm interested in adding hotplug ESATA capability with port multiplier > for backup purposes to something like an R610. Is this supported by > any of the Dell external SAS controllers (don't need raid for this). I don' think any SAS multipliers support SATA port multipliers. You can use SAS multipliers instead, but I don't like LSIs SAS cards, and have had loads of trouble with them in the past (e.g. hardware bugs in the LSI1068E etc.) - just stick with plain commodity (well supported, and cheaper) SATA IMO. Let us know what you come up with... Tim. p.s. I found that the R300s have a bug whereby they don't reliably detect Sil3132s. -- South East Open Source Solutions Limited Registered in England and Wales with company number 06134732. Registered Office: 2 Powell Gardens, Redhill, Surrey, RH1 1TQ VAT number: 900 6633 53 http://seoss.co.uk/ +44-(0)1273-808309 _______________________________________________ Linux-PowerEdge mailing list Linux-PowerEdge@dell.com https://lists.us.dell.com/mailman/listinfo/linux-poweredge Please read the FAQ at http://lists.us.dell.com/faq
