[Conrad Senior]

I realize this is an old thread, but I thought I’d chime in and report some long term results. I use a Sonnet eSata board in my early 2008Mac Pro 3.2×8 machine. Two of these ports and the two on board ports feed a four disk Adonics array in my second optical bay. The other two are more interesting. They feed an external G5 case modded to hold a lot of drives. When I built I planned to host 20 1TB drives. I started out with a mix and match assortment of drives and moved into 2TB Hitachi drives–of which I have ten for 20TB in two Raid 0 10TB arrays mirrored.

Prior to this, I unplugged one of the port multipliers with the power on and fried it. I replaced it and had a few issues with the cables when I move it for first set it up, but by leaving it alone, it has been stable for 1.5 years. I’m very happy with it. I just use it for a time machine backup.

My boot drive is a 160 Intel SSD. I have two other 2.5″ drives–one is an emergency backup for my MacBook Pro, the other is not used.

My four main drives are 1TB Seagates, bought in 2008 and running perfectly in a RAID 0.

So Port Multipliers work. I’m not totally happy with the eSata connectors, but they are fine and pretty fast. I’d like to switch to Thunderbolt if an when I can buy a card for it, and a breakout connector for this case to serve 10TBx2.

I have more than a year of Time Machine backups, which is pretty cool. I’d like to try and lean down my data some on the main drive and wipe and restart the TM drives at some point, but I’m in no hurry as I have more space than I know what to do with. I also use this array to back up three other laptops and a Mac Mini. So far so good.