[geeks] Cheap Dell Servers

[Joshua Boyd]

On Wed, Feb 06, 2008 at 05:45:54PM -0500, nate at portents.com wrote:
> >> How many drives can you fit on a normal SATA bus?
> >
> > As I understand it, SATA is not a bus but a point-to-point technology,
> > so the closest-to-correct answer is "one".
> 
> "One" is true except when using SATA port multipliers.  Then the answer
> becomes 15, though 15 is not a practical way to divide the bandwidth of a
> single SATA port.  The other stipulation is that the SATA host controller
> must support a SATA port multiplier.

A port multiplier does not make SATA a bus instead of a point to point
connection.  A port multier just is the end of one point and the
beginning of 1-5 or 15 additional points.