According to some info i can find online that PowerEdge R210, the first R210 not the R210 II, is supposed to support port multipliers on its eSata port. And i found examples online of some set up this way, well i for one can't get it working here.
I have a 4-bay Sata enclosure, i think its branded RaidStor on the back but i would have to crawl back behind the rack and double check that, that works with pretty much everything i have ever plugged it into. But when i decided to move it over to the R210 which faithfully sits and churns away with storing backups from the network, i wanted to add this 4-bay enclosure to it for just ease of moving stuff around to external removable drives, i found that all it would see is the first drive, the other three are non-existent. I checked Device Manager, told it to search for new hardware and it picked up the first drive, went to disk management and added that drive, partitioned it added a drive leter yada yada, everything went fine with the first drive but the other three that are in there don't show up. But i can take the eSata cable going to the R210 and plug it into the eSata on my laptop even and i get all four drives so there must be something simple i'm missing here.
The only options in the bios for the eSata port are Automatic or Disabled, so i can't find anything else to set. Its running in non-raid, AHCI, two internal hard drives and an optical drive, i would try putting a PCI-E eSata host card in it or a eSata port on a slot bracket and connect to an internal port to try that but i already have the PCI-E slot taken up by the Perc 6/e thats running the MD1000 attached to this server.
Anyone know if there is something else that needs to be done here? Or is Dell lying about the eSata port on these being PM Aware?
