Board with a lot of sata ports?

M

melk

[H]ard|Gawd
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Jan 21, 2014
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So I have been pretty happy with the super lazy solution of using built in Storage Spaces to just make a single huge pool, adding drives as I go along. (I have access to a lot of old/spare hdd's)

I quickly maxed out the 6 sata ports on the current board and am looking for some that might have at least twice as many. Most seem to max out at 10x total, which while better, isn't exactly what I'm looking for.

I could swear I read about an Asrock board that had like 20+ sata ports which would be perfect, but I can't find the sucker.

edit: Here it is https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157470

Currently out of stock :( Is there any other boards out there that have >12 sata ports? Or should I just accept this quest to find a Asrock Z87 Extreme11/ac
 
Why don't you just get an add-on SAS/SATA card like the IBM M1015 or the LSI 9211-8i? Much easier to replace if the controller goes bad. They usually run anywhere from $90-100 or so.
 
You have to keep in mind that no motherboard will have more than 10x SATA ports built into the Intel chipset. To get that you have to go with X99. On Z170, Z270 etc. you get a maximum of 6x SATA ports. Any ports beyond that use inferior controllers often limited to AHCI only operation. These cannot used in a RAID array in conjunction with the Intel controllers. You can of course softRAID these together, but you put your data at risk by doing this. An add-in controller is the smart play here if you need more ports than the chipset provides.
 
There are also problems with onboard SATA controllers if you virtualize your storage OS - you normally have to do passthrough in ESXi and they don't work right when you do that.

I found that out the hard way, have a bunch of unused SATA ports on my GA-990FXA-UD5 and a M1015 controller plugged in so FreeNAS can do its thing.

Also, the SATA controllers onboard are just that, SATA - if it has 10 ports, that's all it will have. If you get a SAS/SATA controller like the M1015 you can buy SAS expanders cheap on eBay to give you a total of 24 ports.

Besides, it would be prudent to separate your OS controller from your storage controller in case issues crop up.
 
Wow! That is a lot of SATA ports. Why do you need so many? Do they make power supplies that support that many drives? OR you just have to keep adding adapters to power them all?
 
I haven't populated FreeNAS fully yet - the case itself is limited to only 22x 3.5" drives.

I have a 1000W PSU and the case itself supports dual PSUs if necessary,

I plan on eventually using iSCSI so that the ESXi storage is on the NAS.
 
I bought a dell 310 card on ebay for $35 and flashed it to lsi 9211 IT firmware. A pair of breakout cables cost me 7 dollars. Then I bought a 40mm fan for $3 to put 9n the 310's heatsink. $45 all in for 8 more sata ports.
 
FeelTheVoid said:
Wow! That is a lot of SATA ports. Why do you need so many? Do they make power supplies that support that many drives? OR you just have to keep adding adapters to power them all?
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See HTPC in sig. 4K VR porn eats up space like crazy!
 
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