# Does intel ICH7 support SATA port replication?

## RayDude

I've got a media machine that I'm trying to hook an external port replicated hard drive case (four drives). Gentoo only sees one drive, the first one.

The drive case also supports USB and it only shows one drive as well. But on another machine, the USB interface shows all four drives, but the ESATA connection on it only shows one drive as well.

I figure I can get the USB working, but 22 MB/sec is kinda slow for HD...

Does anyone have this working?

The hardware is a Mediasonic Probox.

TIA,

Brian

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## BitJam

I will recycle a link from a previous post about building petabyte storage on the cheap.  The page says: *Quote:*   

> A note about SATA chipsets: Each of the port multiplier backplanes has a Silicon Image SiI3726 chip so that five drives can be attached to one SATA port. Each of the SYBA two-port PCIe SATA cards has a Silicon Image SiI3132, and the four-port PCI Addonics card has a Silicon Image SiI3124 chip. We use only three of the four available ports on the Addonics card because we have only nine backplanes. We don’t use the SATA ports on the motherboard because, despite Intel’s claims of port multiplier support in their ICH10 south bridge, we noticed strange results in our performance tests. Silicon Image pioneered port multiplier technology, and their chips work best together.

 

I'd be surprised if Intel had it working on ICH7 and then disabled it for later versions.

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## RayDude

Thanks BitJam.

I wonder if JMICRON supports it...

Doesn't matter, looks like I'm stuck with USB, assuming its fast enough.

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