How many Esata ports can I get away with?

[Matthew Love]

Hey guys,

Gearing up to Red Rocket the Mac Pro we have at the office and turn it into something that will be on set with our Epic shoots but was curious.

We're going to be doing a multiple camera spot (2/3 Epics) and would like to be able to handle simultaneous offloads (Picked up a red station with 2 RED mag SSD readers).

I'd like to keep it all strictly e data so I figure, for the two readers I'd need 2 esata ports and for the two external backup drives I'd need another two, so a total of 4.

I'd obviously like it to be hot swappable compatible as well, would two of these work? Can the mac pro only handle 2 esata connections?

Can anyone point me into a working direction? thank you!

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

You can connect 16 eSATA devices (even more via port multipliers) to an ATTO H6F0 card. All ports are 6Gbps SAS/SATA.

But before we get ahead of ourselves, what Mac Pro are we talking about and what slot(s) do you have available to install it in? Realistically speaking, you're going to want this to be a 2009 or newer mac Pro, that way all 4 slots will be PCIe 2.0 compliant. A card like the ATTO H680 has two mini-SAS external ports, each of which can host four 6Gbps eSATA channels. You can use a mini-SAS to eSATA fan-out cable to connect your SATA devices to these cards. HighPoint makes a good cable -- usually about $50 for a 1x4 fan-out. The ATTO H680 card is about $380.