SATA support for 5,1 Model

[3282868]

I've got the current gen Mac Pro 12-Core, I have the four SATA bays occupied and a 240GB OWC Mercury EXTREME Pro 6G in my second optical bay partitioned with SL and Lion (yes I know it only supports SATA II for now), with a Blu-Ray drive (and thank god you can play Blu-Ray in OS X now).

My question:
The logic board has 6 SATA ports. I have another SSD I'd like to use, but am out of SATA connections. If I were to get an eSATA PCIe card, would I need to plug in one of my SATA connections in order to gain an extra SATA port via the eSATA card? Or is 6 SATA II connections the max the board can support?

Thanks for any help! Hope everyone is having a great Monday (whatever day it is in your country)

 

[derbothaus]

The PCI card has it's own controller. It does not work like a USB hub or anything.

 

[3282868]

The PCI card has it's own controller. It does not work like a USB hub or anything.

Excellent. So I'll be adding two ports or such. Speed wise eSATA should be the same speed as my internal SATA, just externalSATA, correct?

Thanks again for your help! Shame "Light Peak"/"Thunderbolt" PCIe cards aren't possible, but got a USB 3.0 card that makes a difference until the next Mac Pro refresh.

 

[derbothaus]

Excellent. So I'll be adding two ports or such. Speed wise eSATA should be the same speed as my internal SATA, just externalSATA, correct?

Thanks again for your help! Shame "Light Peak"/"Thunderbolt" PCIe cards aren't possible, but got a USB 3.0 card that makes a difference until the next Mac Pro refresh.

Yes. Quality of controller does play a part in overall speed. Might want to get a 1xPCI lane 6G SATAIII card. It wont hit 6Gb/s but you'll have some added headroom for your 3G stuff. That's what I'd do. There is a cheap one that is bootable too here:
http://tonymacx86.blogspot.com/2011/08/increasing-disk-performance-sata-6gbs.html

They have internal and external and mixed versions of the chipset all over the tech world. Just look for ASM1061 Chipset.