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So, this is all just dreaming, but I've been looking at getting an external drive enclosure to house a RAID array.

Looking into all of the available options, External-SATA (esata) seems to be really slick. There are special cables that are used for just such a purpose and internally have 4 esata connections, so one of these 4X cables can support 4 drives through one connection, nice. However, what I am confused about is some manufacturers apparently call these cables "Infiniband". As far as I knew, Infiniband was something not SATA specific, and was typically used as a very high speed server backplane / IO connection.

Does anybody know why some manufacturers use the term "Infiniband" in this application? Is it the same cable as used in infiniband connections, just used conveniently for eSATA?

infiniband is a specification for high speed devices

take to long for me to explan it here but have a read of this.


http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/sDef...96,00.html

Thanks Davey. Yeah that's basically what I found on wikipedia about it, but I was just wondering why manufacturers used the term "infiniband" specifically in conjunction with eSATA disks, because technically, it wouldn't be "infiniband" but it must just use the same physical connector.

well they are using that term because sata 2 is classed as a high speed device so the specification for it is classed as infiniband

does not matter if this is a raid or not its just the specification of the input output range

does that help ?

Ok, I've found out the answer:

Some SATA cards will use a mini-SAS connector externally, rather than an eSATA connector externally. The reason for doing this is mini-SAS can group together 4 "lanes" of eSATA into one physical cable. There are a lot of external drive enclosures that use the "Infiniband" connector, and there is a cable available that adapts mini-SAS to Infiniband, providing 4 eSATA connections to drives within the housing.