eSATA Port Opportunities

[mhumm2]

Hello;

I have an eSATA port on the back of my computer which is a racked system (see specs below). I want an elegant solution to do the following:

- Increase storage capacity significantly
- Access media from that storage medium to play/display on my internet-capable home theater system in another room

Currently I have a very basic system (DSL modem, router, computer). I don't know what exactly I can do with that eSATA port on the back so any suggestions to use it for what I want would be great. Please advise.

mhumm2

[james147]

I have an eSATA port on the back of my computer which is a racked system (see specs below).

Is there any reason you must use the esata port as a pose to one of the internal ones?

Increase storage capacity significantly

You can easily buy a large internal hard disk drive, which will probally be cheaper then an esata drive. You can also buy drive enclosures for sata drives to usb/esata

Access media from that storage medium to play/display on my internet-capable home theater system in another room

This probably depends on what home theatre system it is but you might be able to get away with running a UPNP media server on your desktop which serves the media to the home theatre system. Otherwise you might be able to plug in a usb drive into it (the first option would be nicer as you don't need to remove the drive every time you want to watch something).

Currently I have a very basic system (DSL modem, router, computer). I don't know what exactly I can do with that eSATA port on the back so any suggestions to use it for what I want would be great. Please advise.

You don't need to use it, for storage I would use an internal drive as they tend to be cheaper and hidden away inside your computer (less likely to get their cables knocked out). You could use it for a backup drive, though if you are doing this I would look for a drive with esata and usb so you can recover the data from a computer that doesn't have a esata port on (at which point you could just get a normal usb drive as backups don't need to be that fast).

My esata port is currently unused and I don't really know anyone that does make use of them :S I just use a external usb3 drive for my backups.

[dibl]

I would say (similar to james147), if you consider that elegant=simple, then simply replace the internal 250G hard drive with one as large you can imagine needing. If reinstalling and reconfiguring the system is the obstacle, then, starting with your new drive unpartitioned (but with a partition table) use GParted to copy and paste the OS partition from the 250G drive to the new one. That will leave your system configuration unchanged. Then you can dump your data onto a new & much larger data partition on the new drive.

You may have been thinking of something like putting a second hdd into an external enclosure like this one: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16817173042

I have one of those that I use for backups -- note that you would use an e-sata -- e-sata cable to connect it to your e-sata port.

Your e-sata port will connect to a standard SATA hdd with a SATA-e-sata cable like this: http://discountechnology.com/SATA-Ca...FYFo4Aod-HsjDg

But I still say the elegant solution is just to swap in a big new hdd, copy the OS partition, dump in the data, and off you go.

[mhumm2]

Okay. Well I learned something like I usually do on this forum. I didn't know I could run a UPNP media server for an internal HDD. I thought only networked drives could be used as such. Thank you all. I'll do some testing.

[dibl]

I have not configured a media server, personally, but MythTV seems to be very popular for this purpose. There's lots of MythTV information under the Multimedia forum on Ubuntu forums, and I believe there's a MythTV user forum. There are others:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compari..._media_servers

[oshunluvr]

How you share media with your media system will depend on the device you're using. uPNP, samba, nfs, DLNA are all available but you'll have to determine what will work on the receiving end. I have a home media network that shares with various devices. Start a new thread/topic if you want to discuss.