At the risk of being assigned to the "bad DBA" club... I did something desperate, and may have to undo it.

Problem: After installing a low cost eSATA board, my SQL Server is intermittently unresponsive (seemingly when there is a lot of IO to the eSATA drive).

Questions:

1) Is there a solution to the intermittent unresponsiveness that allows me to keep the eSATA in place?

2) Whether or not (1==true): What is a decent, low cost way to add 1-3 TB storage to SQL for non-critical SQL DBs?

Detail:

Our SAN is full, and expanding it is costly and will take a month. I have a pressing need to add 1-3 TB for some development DBs (e.g. not mission critical; data loss is OK).

As a bandaid, I threw a $20 eSATA PCI board in the Dell 1950 server, and attached an external 2TB eSATA drive.

This seemed to work fine, but I notice that our production SQL DBs, and even remote desktop, now experience network "pauses" that they never did before (with both SQL client apps and remote desktop throwing "networking problem" errors).

This SQL Server has lots of memory, and runs an instance of SQL 2005 (where all line of business apps reside) and an instance SQL 2008 (for development db's). SQL Server RAM has been appropriately configured, and this setup has run great for years.

The server is:

• Dell 1950
• Win2003 x64
• 14GB RAM
• PERC controller,
• 2 mirrored hd's internal
• Dell SAN over gbit ethernet, dual homed
• 2 PCIx slots (1 used by NIC for SAN, 1 now in use for eSATA board)

Thank you for suggestions!