Moving forward, I'm going to connect my two Sans Digital 5-bay eSata enclosures to my HTPC Win 7 Media Center box directly. (and not use WHS for my Videos/Pictures/Music any more) I'll then use http://flexraid.com (the new 2.0 with Cruise Control Pooling/RAID is awesome, built in SMART monitoring as well)



That leads me to my question. What are the chances of receiving SMART data from the Seagate drives in my two Sans Digital 5-bay eSata enclosures?

http://www.sansdigital.com/towerraid-plus/tr5mbp.html


Is it more the Enclosure or Controller card that is the issue if you can't read SMART data?


If it's the controller card, what is the best eSata port multiplier aware eSata PCIe 1x card out there that will pass along SMART data and temps properly?


The card does NOT need to be fully RAID since FlexRaid will be doing all the pooling and RAID-F parity via Windows.


Suggestions?



~Jon

I got some feedback and ideas that my R622 HighPoint card might give me SMART after all. (so need to buy anything else hopefully)

Details:
http://forum.flexraid.com/index.php/topic,997.0.html