eSATA is neat

I just set up a LaCie Quadra 4TB RAID array at work. We needed to buy an eSATA card to get the maximum performance out of it.

I like the board layout. Notice the traces to the eSATA ports; two pairs of perfectly parallel traces from the ASIC to each port. I'm so glad signal processing has reached the point where we can shove ungodly rates down serial lines; remember what a mess parallel buses are? Compare the elegance of the eSATA traces to the mess of PCI bus traces on the lower part of the board.

In any case the drive works great, though I had to partition it using Linux LVM since fdisk doesn't support single volumes bigger than 2TB. Soon 3TB will be online for the database group (4TB * 0.75 due to RAID5) and they will be happy.