Quick question: is there anyone out there with both a EX485/487 and an eSATA enclosure that has attempted to upgrade the Intel Matrix Storage software on the unit. From my understanding, the newer software does support eSATA port mirroring, but requires some support from the system BIOS.

I hate to have to go purchase an external enclosure to test this out, and would be interested in any feedback on this.

I've tried a fair bit of this with no luck so far.

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Good to know. It might be that the BIOS on the EX48X needs to be updated to include the Option ROM that supports port mirroring. Any chance that you might be able to pass this up the food chain.

When I talked with the nice folks in support the other day, they did say that they the official answer is that the Encore series does not support eSATA port mirroring at this time. The unofficial answer is that they want this back...

Unfortunately there's no food chain for me to pass this up, HP is aware of the issue and at least at this point doesn't have a solution. They've read my review and know my opinion on the matter.

ymboc and I have chatted about this a bit, there's some speculation that the chip uses a port multiplier internally to get 6 ports out of the onboard two SATA ports, so getting the eSATA port multiplier aware may not be possible.

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That's odd. I know that most of the machines that I have been tinkering with that have the ICH9R chipset do support port mirroring. Makes me want to try a linux distrubition on one of these that is confirmed to support port mirroring to see if that is the case.

Any takers on that last idea?

Problem is this...

Most (all?) of the Multi-Drive external enclosures are all based on 'FIS' based switching. The ICH9R only supports 'command' based switching. So while the ICH9R may support port mirroring I don't believe it will work with any of these commonly available multi-drive enclosures.

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Hi ymboc,

For port multiplier product in Sans Digital, we support command based PM and we provided one TR4M unit to Intel to tested with the ICH9 chipset with command-based PM 1~2 years ago. However, they only tested in Linux environment at that time. It end up apply the latest libsata patch to kernel to make it work.

As far as I know, they have not release any driver update in Windows for PM.

Thanks,

Stanley

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Thanks for clearing that up stanley... I've seen forum posts that suggested better PM support in linux than in windows but I didn't expect your enclosures to support command based switching and had assumed that was the reason why (FIS-supporting) PCIe esata adapters are included with your enclosures.

I've found it hard to find authoritative info on the extent of PM support in various chipsets & enclosures... whatever else you can bring to the table to further clear things up would be greatly appreciated.

Ok, so the possible light at the end of the tunnel is to make sure that:

Make sure that the ICH9R in the EX48x series is not using PM internally
See if we can find a ICH9R drivers for Windows Server 2003 that supports command mode PM

Just looking at the board, and trying to follow the pinouts, most of the leads for the backplane connector correspond to the documented leads for the SATA leads off the Southbridge. So, that should take care of item 1.

That leaves item 2, which is up to the folks at Intel.