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17475
June 26th, 2009 12:00
adding more than two SATA devices to a 2 internal SATA port Dimension 5100
My Dimension 5100 has only 2 onboard SATA ports, and I am using them both for internal hard drives. I want to put in new larger hardrives and put the old ones in eSATA external enclosures. I know they sell eSATA PCI cards, but I believe they require you to use one of your available onboard SATA ports to connect to. Are there any eSATA cards that you connect to a motherboard SATA port but then has both an interior SATA port to connect the internal HD that lost its onboard port to the card, and an eSATA port (or 2) for connecting the external drives? Or does each SATA or eSATA device need a dedicated motherboard SATA port? (i.e. you cannot hub out like a USB).
Thank you
shesagordie
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June 26th, 2009 15:00
AKRBT
Each SATA drive, requires it's own dedicated connector.
You could use a PCI SATA controller card, similar to THIS, that would give two additional internal SATA and two external SATA connectors.
Bev.
AKRBT
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July 9th, 2009 01:00
Thank you- I think I was confusing a eSATA pass thru PCI card (which you hook up each external port to a internal SATA port that is available, in my case none since I have only two) with a true eSATA PCI card that gives you new external SATA port (or ports) and sometimes also additional internal ones.
So my new question is this:
my Dell has (2) SATA 1.0 internal ports built in.. does adding a eSATA 2.0 card give me 2.0 speeds, and, if so and I buy one with two internal SATA 2.0 ports, should I then connect my internal harddrives to these new SATA 2.0 ports to gain speed, or is my motherboard or PCI bus limited anyways to SATA 1.0 speeds or less.
My ultimate goal is to replace my two internal 250 GB SATA drives with two new 500GB SATA drives, which are usually SATA 2.0 compliant these days, and then take one or both of my existing hard drives and put them in external eSATA enclosures as additional media storage and disk image backup. I want to do this as I do a clean install of Windows 7 in October.
Since you seem pretty computer savy, would you put Windows 7 on a partition of its clean install drive, or are partitions outdated now?? .. it seems Windows always wants to put My Documents into the operating system partition, which causes problems if you make it too small and then have a lot of media files.