[conspire] Parts is Parts

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Nick Moffitt (nick at zork.net):

> Surely if you're going SATA, it's trivial to buy an external drive
> enclosure with its own power supply, and connect to your SATA controller
> from there.  

eSATA would indeed be one inexpensive way to do it.

You have to somehow support a very large number of SATA connections off
a relative few SATA HBA cards and motherboard connectors:  There might 
be problems or bottlenecks of the sort people don't really anticipate 
because almost nobody (or literally nobody) tested that particular
configuration.  

Let's face it; we're talking about a rather large number of drives, and
that's seldom done with ATA _other_ than mediated by hardware
abstraction devices like 3Ware or Coraid boxes.