[Siftah]

Hi All,
I've been using my Dell Mini 1011/10v for the past 5 years as a low power server, it's ideal for this and even has a built-in KVM for emergency maintenance

However, the two external USB connected SATA HD's I have are starting to become a little limiting and I need some more room. I'd also really like to have the storage space connected internally via SATA, to get some additional speed.

Currently, my 1011 boots from an internal SSD connected to the SATA bus.

My ideal situation would be to keep the internal SSD connected for boot and swap, then to have a second SATA connected drive of 4 or 5 TB connected to the second SATA slot. But I'm not sure how to get something connected to the second SATA channel.

I can see in the dmesg output that there's two theoretical ports available;
ata1: SATA max UDMA/133 cmd 0x1f0 ctl 0x3f6 bmdma 0x1810 irq 14
ata2: SATA max UDMA/133 cmd 0x170 ctl 0x376 bmdma 0x1818 irq 15

I'm just not sure how physically to connect this - would a splitter cable work?

My other option is to go the PCI-e route and use something like this; IOCREST IO-MPCE1061-2I Mini PCI-Express SATA 3.0 Controller Card - Green - Free Shipping - DealExtreme

Anyone tried this?

[holmes4]

There's no such thing as a SATA splitter cable. The chipset has two SATA ports but only one of them is wired up. I don't know what the MiniPCIe options are in a 1011.

[Siftah]

I tried the above mentioned PCI card, but it doesn't show up in either lspci or dmesg output.

The PCI slot certainly works as a WWAN card in the same slot works fine - it could be a dead card, but I've not yet managed to validate it works in any other machine.

:/

[TwistyTravster]

Originally Posted by Siftah

My other option is to go the PCI-e route and use something like this; IOCREST IO-MPCE1061-2I Mini PCI-Express SATA 3.0 Controller Card - Green - Free Shipping - DealExtreme

Anyone tried this?

Originally Posted by holmes4

There's no such thing as a SATA splitter cable. The chipset has two SATA ports but only one of them is wired up. I don't know what the MiniPCIe options are in a 1011.

This may still work. I believe the main issue is one of two things.

One, you may only need to tape off pin 20 to allow the BIOS to recognize the unauthorized use of a non-WWAN card, due to the fact that
some manufacturers purposely make it so that the mPCI-e slot is intentionally locked to only work with a supported WWAN cards.



Two, it may not work because the motherboard doesn't have a software SATA controller in the BIOS for the mPCI-e slot. If this is the case,
then there's nothing you can do, EXCEPT possibly use a mPCI-E to dual-USB card and then attach a dual-USB to SATA cable. This should
allow the BIOS to assign a SATA controller through the use of the USB bus directly through standardized mPCI-e pin configuration.





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