RN104 eSATA port

Formatting disks isn't supported yet.

Also the EDA500 is an eSATA expansion chassis. Not sure if it is supported on the ARM models though.

I doubt a 3rd party chassis would be supported.

For the 104 I think connecting an eSATA disk a bit like a USB disk is what is supported.

I guess the question is what is and is not supported via that port. It seems to support port multiplier, because it can see the disks and all of them are active within the chassis (in previous experiments, ports that don't support port multiplier only activate one HDD). But I don't know how to get the disks to an accessible state. I'll have a look at how USB disks are supposed to work but any further thoughts would be much appreciated! Cheers!

Try connecting the disks to your PC and delete the partitions off them.

I've searched and was unable to find anything on hard drive enclosures of either USB or ESata on 100/300/500 before deciding to go with the 314. You are in uncharted territory and do hope you come back and post your findings. I would rather not have to pay out more than what I paid for the 314 for the EDA500. I am not even sure it would work on the 100 series in your case since it is not mentioned in the supported options on Netgear's web site.

I will post my results. I'm not sure I see the point in an eSATA point on the device if it doesn't work with HDD enclosures. What was designed to be connected to it? If it's not Netgear's own HDD eSATA enclosures...

I've done a bit more testing and found out some stuff (some of which might be considered obvious, but I will list it).

If you plug a device via USB into the RN104 and it detects the drive and successfully mounts it, it will appear in the interface under System > Overview and it will look like an additional drive with a few extra options for unmounting it. I cannot confirm if this is the same for ESATA, but I think it safe to presume it would be.

I removed all drives bar one from my external ESATA enclosure and powered it on. The RN104 detected it and under System > Volumes it displayed a diagram of an external enclosure with 5 HDD slots. It indicated that it was an EDA500XXX which is not correct, but still let me interact with the external enclosure. The power button will no longer cause the display to turn on, and several pages within the administration console will no longer respond (System > Volumes and all other tabs. System > Overview, Settings and Logs all display data, though some of it is erroneous as it indicated all the HDDs were running at -1 degree celsius). It would not allow me to access the disk and gave an error "Please remove inactive volumes in order to use the disk. Disk #1." I selected the new drive that was listed on System > Volumes and told it to destroy the existing partition. It did this, but upon attempting to create a new volume it stopped responding. It appeared to be responding to this request, but went nowhere and the drive does not have a volume on it.

I spoke with Netgear Support and we ran through a bunch of different permutations of my hardware trying to identify the issue. I wish I caught the gentlemans name at the start of the call, as he was very helpful, and is escalating the issue to the engineering team to identify exactly what the ESATA port supports. He referred to the forums when he was searching on the issue, so I'm guessing that there is not a confirmed list of devices which are compatiable.

I must admit that it is somewhat frustrating that this is so difficult a problem to solve. Plugging a USB device into the port on the front of the 104 is so seamless from a user perspective, it's really painful trying to kluge a solution just to be able to read and write to JBOD volumes via the ESATA. I will update this thread further when I hear back from Netgear (hopefully with a step-by-step solution).

I've plugged in two different eSATA HD units. Both of them are just simple plugin/plugout drive units. One has a single drive slot, the other has a double drive slot.

The single drive unit is recognized by the 104 as a standalone drive and mounts exactly as a USB drive mounts. I can access the partitions as shares, copy files, etc. etc.

The double drive unit is recognized by the 104 as a EDA500XXX and seems to treat it as an enclosure. I haven't got a spare drive to test what actually happens in this mode.

I would also expect that the drive in the "enclosure" will be handled differently depending on whether you are using X-RAID or FlexRAID.

I'm hoping to have a spare drive available soon (after doing the drive content shuffle) and will report back what I find.

Thanks toeknee93, I'd really appreciate any further info. I wonder if it handles port multiplier in a non-standard manner and that is causing the issue.

Ok, just done a couple of quick tests. 104 running 6.1.4 with a single 500Gb Seagate drive in X-RAID as JBOD. Extra drive was a 1Tb WD Green drive.

The docking station I have been using has a model number of WLX-876C. A quick Google search got me to this: http://www.cccme.org.cn/products/detail-3016632.aspx

I originally had placed two drives in the dock with the expectation that they would both appear as external drives to allow me to copy off data. Instead they appeared as an EDA500XXX enclosure and the 104 asked me to remove the existing partitions. I decided not to 8)
Having just cleaned off the 1Tb drive I decided to try a couple of configurations.
First configuration: Flex-RAID - Drive appeared with existing partitions. I removed the partitions and created a JBOD volume. Created share, wrote stuff to it. No issues. Existing 500Gb drive still in JBOD.
Second configuration: X-RAID - Drive appeared with partition created by Flex-RAID. Removed the partition and waited to see what happened. After 15 minutes the drive was still doing nothing, leading me to believe that X-RAID had issues configuring it. Web interface became unresponsive. I powered off the 104 and disconnected the dock.

So, Flex-RAID seems to be happy with the dock, but I didn't try doing parity from the 104 to the dock, but I would have to assume that should work. X-RAID, however, seems to have an issue. Not a problem for me as I was just going to create a couple of JBODs and a couple of RAID1 groups, so the JBODs can live on the dock when I get there.

I don't know what chipset this dock uses, and I'm not going to pull it apart to find out either, but it will give me a couple of extra drive slots, which will come in handy.