I have the upgrade itch.....

My WHS that i recently built on a budget is running a intel E1400 which is fine enought.... on a cheap fry's matx G31 board with like 1 PCI slot for expansion....

i was wanting to keep my low TDP CPU and keep two cores but add enough expansion to allow me to hotswap fill my norco 4020 w/o shutting down and adding cards and cables


I was browsing Newegg and saw this board
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131253

at $200 it would be funny having my $30 CPU in it

it has 8 SATA ports and 4 SAS port
i could hook my RR 2300 4 port and RR 2220 8 port to get 20 SATA and 4 SATA with still having two PCI slots and 1 exta PCI-X slot open.....

this looks like the best WHS Norco board ever!!!!!


is there any cable to connect the SAS ports to a SATA backplane so i could get rid of my RR 2300?

anyone see any issues with the board?

Also what is the the mini PCIe looking connector on there?

actually it has 4 x sata and 8 x sas
yes you can connect sas ports to sata backlane

the board is not bad but remember it's a server board so you will have to use ECC ram

the mini pcie is for asus smb addon card.

I seem to have that itch alot.

What axan said is true, the server ram sometimes makes it a little more expensive.

I have this board in my WHS and it has been rock solid. I'm running a single SM SAT2-MV8 in one of the PCI-X slots right now and a Intel Quad GB NIC in the other PCI-X. I've got 16 of my 4020's bays hooked up at the moment. I plan of getting a SM SASLP when I need the other 4. I use 2 of the 4 ICH7 SATA ports for my boot drive and slim optical. The Broadcom NICs are not the best, but they do allow teaming and worked well enough until I went to the Intel Quad NIC.

This board does not require ECC memory. I'm running 4GB's of standard DDR2-800 Patriot memory with no problems.

Wow, without ECC I'm starting to become convinced this may be my next board.

As I recall, I didn't have any issues putting that build together. It just worked.

odd that you don't need ecc but hey that makes it pretty sweet board

Ok, I am a bit confused. Are those eight SAS connections only really able to hook up to two SFF 8087 connections? Or can each one of those connect to their own SFF 8087 connection? I am assuming the first way is correct or else we would see lots of these boards being used in the 20+ HD builds we see on here.

axan said:

odd that you don't need ecc but hey that makes it pretty sweet board

Click to expand...

ECC != registered or buffered.

Desktops and laptops use unbuffered non-ECC RAM

You can get unbufferedRAM that has ECC RAM for Intel 3000 series chipset motherboards for only about a 15 to 20% premium over non-ECC unbuffered RAM. Intel's single socket server chipsets have used unbuffered RAM with ECC optional for some time now.

Multi socket servers need registered (for AMD multi socket systems) or fully buffered (intel multi socket servers) RAM. ECC comes standard on registered and buffered RAM , but it's optional on unbuffered RAM/

I know this post was really confusing, but the bottom line is you can use standard RAM on Intel's single socket server boards.