[conspire] anyone know of any eSATA PCI Express cards?

[Peter Knaggs]

Hi All,

An eSATA hardware question:

I have a couple of spare PCI Express slots and would like to use them
for connecting some external eSATA drives to (currently using USB).

So far I haven't seen many examples of cards which could do that.
What such a thing physically looks like is apparently:
  http://www.datoptic.com/index.php/four-esata-pci-express.html
Whether it really supports linux is the puzzle.

Reading over Rick's excellent SATA support page
  http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Hardware/sata.html
at the time PCI Express was I guess fairly new, so the only card
mentioned is the one-port ADSA3GPX1-E card:
  http://www.addonics.com/products/host_controller/adsa3gpx1-e.asp

I saw mention of the concept of "port multipliers", is this a good idea?
  http://forums.overclockers.com.au/showthread.php?t=692422
It seems to only apply to internally-installed drives, or is it possible to
do the same for external drives?
  http://www.addonics.com/products/host_controller/ad5sapm.asp

Oh and the reason I'm even looking into this eSATA stuff in the first place
is that it seems that something weird has happened to the kernel's firewire
support for the trusty SYBA Model SD-PEX-FWB PCI Express 1394 FireWire cards
(which use the Texas Instruments TSB82AA2 chip): they worked fine in Jaunty,
but in Lucid things are unreliable (apparently random disconnects and errors,
which I haven't found any reason for).
  http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16815124050

Cheers,
Peter.