Sorry Mike,
I didnt mean to confuse m8y, lets see if i can help (as i absolutely love moding) i get a little carried away.
So, eSATA is External Serial ATA, as you may know, ATA is the standard for IDE devices on the PC
(Internal) SATA Cable
now for around £2.50 on eBay you can buy an adapter that will convert regular 40pin IDE to SATA which is 8 pin in a nice thin cable (not the huge flat ugly cable of regular IDE )
IDE to SATA Converter
- Flavour 1
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- Flavour 2
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Now the standard IDE port of the Amiga's are 44pin so we need an IDEfix97 unit OR other Buffered IDE device for the Amiga. have a lookie on Amiga-Hardware.com for such devices, Amigakit also offer a range of such devices from £10 and up.
The Classic IDEFix97 express
I would recommend just about any buffered interface for this task, without one you are limited to an unbuffered two devices. also the faster the adapter the better the throughput for you Amiga
anyway, we have but only covered HALF the story, so we now have an Amiga capable of communicating to Devices in SATA, we need to {A} get some devices that also use SATA and {B} look at how to make a small mod for extra style points.
so instead of this ugly cable hanging out the back your miggy.
Ugly 40 pin flat IDE cable
see its made internal for a reason, no one wants to see that hanning out side a computer... urrgh...
we want something like this.
Sexy, Slick eSATA cable
okay perhaps a i get a little Tooo carries away... so what we want to do now.. is convert our internal SATA to eSATA (so we can plug into the side of our Amiga.)
Overly Big pointless pic of eSata backplane
now by using two of the above we would detach them from the metal back plane and fit them to our Amiga. how and where is a matter of preference but here (as always) are some suggestions.
- Rear of Amiga
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- Right of Amiga (not my idea of an ideal place to be honest)
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- Left of Amiga (now this is my idea of a cool positioning
)
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Making the holes is quite simple, all you need is a small drill hole, some needle files, a pencil to mark you area's OH and a lot of patience, the best mods take time to hack
(i am imagining that meega *our resident mod* is doing his nut over the size of pics *heheh*, sorry m8y, if its worth anything , i am on a widescreen lappy atm... looks good here
)
okay... so we now have external eSATA ports we need eSATA drives to make it all happen

.
now remember we are still limited by the Amiga IDE, even though we are using SATA adaptors. this means to get the REAL use of large hard disks you would need to use a different file system, have a look on eab.abime.net or amiga.org for more info.
so heres some lovely pics to consider
- sata external hard disks
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- heres a simple elegant one (2.5" too)
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- technically it would work *to read data*.... but you would be the first to know....unless i beat you..

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anyway there are a lot of external eSATA enclosures, just have a look on eBay,
now i do hope this clears up some of my earlier ramblings...