Plug n play eSATA interface card for Fedora 7/8?

[saqibali]

Hello,

I volunteer for a non-profit and we have deployed some Linux servers at our offices in the underdeveloped countries. We were using USB based backup device for doing backups. However the USB is very slow. So I was thinking of buying some eSATA interface cards and installing them on these server, and using Seagate's Free Agent external drive with eSATA interface to perform the backups.

Any suggestions on any good plug-n-play eSATA interface that will just work without requiring additional drivers to be loaded on Fedora 7/8? It has to be plug-n-play as I can not access these machines to load the drivers.

Thanks
Saqib
http://www.full-disk-encryption.net/wiki

[sej7278]

the silicon image kit is well supported, such as the 3114 (pci) and 3124 (pci-express) although not sure if either of those is strictly esata (you can get them with external sata connectors and a sata-to-esata cable, but that's not the same) i'm sure there are proper SIL esata cards - 3132 maybe?

[lmo]

I'll just report my experience with eSATA.

I have a Promise SATA300 TX4302 (2-internal, 2-external) which I bought because it was a product that was available on the WD website and I made the assuption that meant that it would work with a 500GB WD My Book Premuim ES and it did work on linux without software change. On windows, the driver had to be installed. I then bought a Seagate 500GB ST3500601XS-RK eSATA drive which works too, and that package included a Promise SATA300 (2-external) card which I have never tested.

The Seagate drive does not produce the many apparently harmless log messages the the WD drive produces under heavy use. However, the Seagate drive has a sleep mode after a few minutes of inactivity and takes a few seconds to wake up. Also this particular Seagate drive has a power button that needs to be manually pressed before or during system boot up bios screen.

Also there is a port numbering switch-around that the kernel did between 2.6.21 and 2.6.22 on the SATA300 TX4302 which can lead to much confusion about which drive is which if the kernel revision is changed.

I think you must test an example of a product before deploying it in a remote location. The eSATA drives seem to be fast, but some of them have their own peculiarities.

[sej7278]

lmo i think you bought a bad combination there - the seagate external drives are known to have that stupid sleep mode, and promise sata controllers have never been wonderfully supported.

i think an external enclosure and a seperate drive and seperate controller is the best bet instead of an all-in-one-doesnt-really-work-unless-its-windows solution.