Well, long story short, I blew it when I bought my Intel RAID card for my CAD workstation, I went with the most current model, and for whatever reason _ass_umed that it would be supported under Win 7, as it was still a ways away from the dreaded EOL. Nope. 8.1, 10, a few server variants, and a number of Linux flavors. Unfortunately, the card is too expensive to set aside and just use as a learning experience, so I had to figure out a workable Plan B.

I took stock of my current hardware situation, and found there are a number of items I have that would allow me to build a basic machine to pretty much just run the RAID card alone, but Id need to purchase a few specialized parts, most of which I ordered today. The biggie was 'reasonably' priced Micro ATX board I could find that had a 10GbE port on it, because I am planning on connecting them up directly via Ethernet, and as the WS has 2 of those ports, I'll just dedicate one of them to be a high speed interconnect. Not as fast as being right on the PCI-E bus, but not too shabby I'd have to think either. Just need to get the proper cable to do it.

I have a relatively small M-ATX case that I will be using, it should hold everything adequately, and I will be using the External SATA cables off the back of the RAID card, and running into the main case to the HD's. I know that people these days commonly use multiple PSU's together, especially with all the mining business going on, but I am wondering if there is anything I should be aware of if I am going to be connecting them together only thru the SATA cable? All the HD's power is still coming from the main PSU in the CAD machine, as that one has the drive bays and PSU connections to handle it. Is there something I should know about to either ground them together, or something else, because I'd really like to avoid frying anything, as most of it is pretty expensive stuff.

Feel free to ask me any questions you think are relevant, I'll do my best to answer them. And feel free to let me know if you think that this is a fools errand as well. Thanks!

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That is an unusual configuration to say the least. I've never come across similar. That said I would think you would NOT want to connect them together via a common ground. SATA is all about data transmission and injecting common mode ground currents would degrade the signal to noise ratio on the SATA connections and possibly cause data transmission errors.

I would just connect the SATA cables to the RAID controller and not have any other connections between the two cases.

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Seti@Home classic workunits:20,676 CPU time:74,226 hours

A proud member of the OFA (Old Farts Association)

Thinking on it further, whatever the external SATA cables are going to be plugged into, by definition would have it's own power supply, so I guess I am over thinking this one a bit much. Thanks for the reply.

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