Reddit reviews StarTech.com 6 ft Shielded External eSATA Cable M/M - 6ft External SATA Cable - 6ft eSATA Cable (ESATA6)
We found 3 Reddit comments about StarTech.com 6 ft Shielded External eSATA Cable M/M - 6ft External SATA Cable - 6ft eSATA Cable (ESATA6). Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
Connect your external SATA storage devices to your Laptop or desktop6 ft Shielded External eSATA Cable M/M C eSATA to eSATA Cable C 6ft eSATA (M) to eSATA (M)Compliant with Serial ATA III SpecificationsData transfer rate of up to 6 Gbps
Also damn handy if friends show up and want a heap. :)
This is an eSATA port. That must be on the back of the external HDD you are purchasing as well as your computer.
This is an eSATA cable.
The system was just a standard AMD quad core Athlon II X4 processor and 16 gigs of DDR3 memory. ZFS runs best in 64 bit mode and needs lots of memory. The more memory you can provide, the better it will perform.
The eSATA card was like this: http://www.amazon.com/Syba-eSATA-Controller-Components-SD-SA2PEX-2E/dp/B000NTM9SY/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1462916478&sr=8-2
The eSATA card works with any port multiplier that is used in these external enclosures. It allows 4 or 5 devices to all communicate on the same cable.
The enclosure is here: http://www.amazon.com/Sans-Digital-TowerRAID-TR8M-Performance/dp/B004WNLP8W/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1462916620&sr=8-1
Here's my review of the enclosure: http://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R2V46N8B7INQJR/ref=cm_cr_getr_d_rvw_ttl?ie=UTF8&ASIN=B004WNLP8W
Here's the eSATA cables I purchased: http://www.amazon.com/StarTech-6-Feet-Shielded-External-ESATA6/dp/B000ENYXZ6/ref=sr_1_1?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1462916753&sr=1-1
The beauty of this system is that any drives will work. You can put in 8TB or 1TB drives and they will all work because there's no RAID on the controller that needs to be added or updated. It will just show raw devices to the system. FreeBSD sees them as /dev/ada1, /dev/ada2, etc. From that point its just a matter of creating your pool, whether that be RaidZ of some flavor or a mirror or a striped mirror.
$ zpool status
pool: derwood
state: ONLINE
scan: scrub repaired 0 in 1h30m with 0 errors on Sat Jan 2 13:42:56 2016
config:
NAME STATE READ WRITE CKSUM
derwood ONLINE 0 0 0
mirror-0 ONLINE 0 0 0
ada5 ONLINE 0 0 0
ada6 ONLINE 0 0 0
mirror-1 ONLINE 0 0 0
ada7 ONLINE 0 0 0
ada8 ONLINE 0 0 0
errors: No known data errors
pool: media
state: ONLINE
scan: scrub repaired 0 in 2h14m with 0 errors on Mon Jan 4 07:20:32 2016
config:
NAME STATE READ WRITE CKSUM
media ONLINE 0 0 0
raidz1-0 ONLINE 0 0 0
ada4 ONLINE 0 0 0
ada3 ONLINE 0 0 0
ada2 ONLINE 0 0 0
ada1 ONLINE 0 0 0
errors: No known data errors
After getting the pools set up it was just a matter of setting up Samba to share the pools so that they can be used by other systems on my network. I also set up NFS so that my Linux systems could talk to it.