Why is there never more than 8 connections?

obviouslytom

obviouslytom

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Feb 24, 2005
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Why is it that you can not get a motherboard with more than 8 SATA connections on it along with some serious RAID support and SAS connections?

It seems that for what I have planned to do at home, that I would spend a small fortune on controller cards for everything.

Thoughts?
 
Thoughts?
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I believe there are $275 supermicro xeon based boards with 8 port SAS HBAs + 6 SATA ports. Also an 8 port Intel SAS hba is only $150, I would not call that a small fortune. Now if you want hardware raid that is a different story. I believe in most cases home users should not use hardware raid since they do not need the uptime it provides. Instead they need to have a backup which can be done without any type of raid and individual disks for their storage.
 
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That supermicro is for servers. What about regular off the shelf boards? Why don't they exist?
 
I'm all for ridiculous, but if you're needing more than 8 sata ports, don't try to cheap out. I'm not exactly sure how much luck you'll have with software raid for 8 drives on a drive. Good luck with your crazy endeavor.

Asrock has some motherboards coming out which will have a bunch of sata and sas ports for X79 but I seriously doubt it's gonna be cheap.
 
Gigabyte motherboards often have up to 10 SATA ports. Many other people do not use more than 6 SATA ports. Besides, good RAID controllers cost a whole lot of money, that's why add-on RAID cards can cost upwards of $200.
 
Asrock Fatal1ty professional board has 10 sata ports, 9 for internal use 1 is shared with esata but if you dont need the esata you can use 10 internal.

its the MB im planning on getting soon because of all the sata ports.
 
The Asrock X58 Extreme 6 comes with 12 SATA connections; 6 Intel SATA II & 6 Marvell SATA III.

Ok, it comes with 6 reliable ports. :D

I am using the Intel ports on mine for now and saving the Marvell ports for later upgrades (if they function well enough to use).
 
What exactly do you want this machine for? (that is what are your requirements other than lots of sata ports)

If you can wait a few months SB-E/x79 may well be worth considering, apparently it will be coming with 14 ports as part of the chipset and some of those ports even support SAS!

But right now you are into either a server motherboard or getting a desktop motherboard and dropping in a SAS card.
 
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I've got 9 SATA ports on my inexpensive Asus P7P55D-E
 
X58 has enough lanes but with P67 and Z68 there are not enough lanes to support 10. Seems like you need a separate controller and what not.
 
Do you just need a lot of storage in which case a SATA multiplexer would do what you need a lot cheaper than a server motherboard? If you REALLY need over 800MB/s in read/write surely you're doing something you have to admit is very unusual for somebody to want to do on a consumer level board.
 
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