Patrickbear ->
Most of the people at this forum have spent many a nights and days testing, troubleshooting and probably a bit of swearing. I do believe we all here are quite confident in OpenBSD and its workings and going ons. I must say that i to do find it quite insulting that a person with 10+ years of systems administration (a varied os experience i assume?) has to ask a silly question about something that he/she has the resources to answer for themselves.
"jgimi, with all respect, but I am not paid for debugging." Yikes man ... so what do you do, create user accounts? I to admin a multiple environment network with over 28 servers, and I debug quite a variety of different errors daily, its part of my job. Unfortunitly being on the phone with tech support of some applications that my company has purchased, is also part of my job, keeping the network and its services running properly.
"My opinion about things like this USB-stuff is quite simple: Don't do it", yes your opinion, now we ALL here have plugged in a USB device into OpenBSD of many different versions, although your opinion *MAY* matter, your delivery of it is quite rude. Why do i say that? well because it seems to me that you have more time to be a smart ass online about what you *HAVE* done than what you are willing to spend time on to get working.
No offense to anything stated or otherwise but like i said it seems to me like you are too lazy? or busy? to try out what you are asking, like Jggimi said "This is not a help desk, Patrick. This is a user community. It's a relatively small one, too." That means that we basically do our own testing and troubleshooting which i am sure you are familiar with, which includes us plugging in a E-SATA connecter to "test" out results.
I am sure that you MAY have been thorough in testing this USB problem across 3 BSD platforms, with different USB devices i hope? to conclude that BSD (in different flavours with different setups) IS in fact the problem.
I have more than ten years of systemadministration in my fingertips, and almost 8 with BSDs, as well as Sun, SGI etc. I doubt I'll need some funny lesson telling me where to find hardware errata or commercial support. If you don't have any other assistance to offer: Thank you and have a nice day.
"The question remains, does anyone have experience with ESATA and is it stable with OpenBSD. Because until gettin paid for spending a week or two trying and testing if it works: No way." I am not sure if you are a director or super manager of some IT department somewhere but it sounds to me like you are far to educated? to do some dirty work, also refusing quite a few sincere and definitive responses and retorting with comments to people that CAN help ........... But it seems to me that you have already decided that BSD's and USB are a no-no (your opinion, as you stated).
Oddly enough i have not had any problems to that effect with supported devices ... and I have been using OpenBSD since 2.4 and MANY, MANY, MANY other operating systems ...
"Oh well...
Back to topic, if someone really has experience, with ESATA, please tell me."
I get paid to test and retest and configure and reconfigure, then deploy, I am shocked (and offended
)to find that another sysadmin does not get paid to do such things for his servers or network, all jokes and bashing aside, i am sure that you posses the skills and experience to answer your own question about ESATA ...........