Friday, November 15, 2013

Cheap Thunderbolt eSATA solution





You can go out and spend 179ドル on a LaCie eSATA Thunderbolt hub or make your own with various parts for under 55ドル-100ドル. I was able to jury-rig a 3ドル.50 micro male SATA to eSATA cable with the Seagate Thunderbolt docks to make a working Thunderbolt - eSATA solution.

I used both the STAE129 Desktop Adapter (reviewed here on this blog) and the portable STAE121 Go-Flex adapter (also reviewed here on this blog). Both can be bought, heavily discounted at the Direct Seagate Store. They often go on sale for 50ドル and 100ドル.





All I needed was a special cable that is 3ドル.50 on Amazon. It is basically a male micro SATA to eSATA cable. In short, a portable set-up can cost as low as 60ドル.



In order to use this, you will need to break the two retaining clips on both sides. It goes in one way since it is a L-shape connector. Since you are using eSATA, you won't need the power from the SATA connector.




Voila. Thats it!

And guess what, OS X reports it as a port multiplier. I don't know if that is true or not but that is what is reported. This means you can hook this up to those cheap 80ドル 4 bay JBOD RAID enclosures.



I connected to both the portable and desktop Seagate Thunderbolt adapters.
Performance wise, you will hit 3 Gbps SATA.

I connected them twice to the SansDigital TOWERRAID TR4UTBPN 4 bay RAID enclosure.

For a 9TB spinning RAID 5, this is not bad. See the benchmark below.


So there you have it. A cheap make-shift solution. I make no guarantees. You can fry something up. If you don't feel safe with this, you can always go and buy the La Cie for 179ドル-199.


Link:
http://www.amazon.com/Micro-SATA-Cables-eSATA-Inches/dp/B002P6W8E8/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1384560580

4 comments:

  1. Hi, I was curious if you tried this with a 4-disk JBOD interface with the Seagate GoFlex 2.5" thunderbolt enclosure? I am thinking about buying one of these to try with mine, but am unsure if it will work.

    Reply Delete
    Replies
    1. I don't have a JBOD external box to test this on right now. If I do get a chance, I'll report back.

      Delete
  2. Have you tested this configuration with DROBO S? I have replicated your configuration but it does not connect to DROBO.

    Reply Delete
  3. Does the portable adapter works just the same as the desktop adapter despite not having a 12v?

    Reply Delete

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