esata

[Stephen Adler]

Guys,

I want to expand the disk capacity of a server which is stuffed with 
drives already. So now I'm thinking that I should consider an external 
device which holds several sata disks. This is my first exposure to 
external sata drives and I want to make sure I'm not doing something 
dumb. One thing which I've noticed is that the usual one drive per sata 
port does not seem to apply. The external boxen I've found on the net 
have a single esata port which drives multiple disks. So, if I buy one 
of these external drive enclosurs and install two drives, will linux see 
the two drives individually as /dev/sdc and /dev/sdd? Or will I only see 
one raided drive. These boxes seem to have raid built into them. Since 
I'm currently using software raid on my linux setup, I want to have 
access to each individual drive so I can add them to my current raid array.

Thanks in advance for any comments on this.

Cheers. Steve.