e-sata ports

[Alfred Melvin]

My first build will make use old components I have. My question is can I use e-sata ports on a mother board for spare drive, and an SSD as L2ARC's ?

 

[jgreco]

You can use an eSATA port for a spare drive or even a component drive, but if the drive is powered separately from the system, that could be a problem if it became detached someday (reliability issue).

An L2ARC is basically expected to be a SSD. Make sure you have enough main system RAM for sufficient ARC. I believe that I determined that a 60GB SSD required 1.5GB of ARC, so you could probably do 60GB on an 8GB RAM system or something like that.

 

[Alfred Melvin]

The MB (ASUS M4A79XTO EVO)that I'll be using has an internal e-sata port that I intend to use as the SSD port for L2ARC. I've got several 80GB Intel units so I figured I'd use one.