15 SATA HDD to 1 PC

M

MeatballCB

Weaksauce
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Oct 8, 2008
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Recently picked up a Rosewill RSV-L4500 for a project I've been working on, and since it's got 15 drive bays, it got me thinking if it would be possible, without breaking the bank, to populate all 15 bays and run them from a single motherboard.

Anyone have any thoughts if there's a reasonably priced motherboard / add-in card combo that could take 15 SATA drives?
 
If you're going to run that many drives, look for an "old" IBM M1015 or an LSI 9211-8i. They are usually pretty cheap. You can run the 6-8 SATA drives from the motherboard and then you have 8 more from the add-in card to play with.
 
Your links don't work.

Also, there's no way I'd go with Syba/IO Crest for $60-80 with a Marvell controller when you can get the M1015 with the LSI controller for the same price. You'll run out of PCIe bandwidth controlling 8 cards on the same PCIe x1 slot.
 
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Tried to fix links. And that one only has 2 ports though. Anything with more than 2 ports creeps up in price pretty quickly.
 
SticKx911 said:
Tried to fix links. And that one only has 2 ports though
Click to expand...

They don't have two ports...they are SAS connectors and you get 4xSATA to every one SAS port. You use breakout cables like these.
 
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kirbyrj said:
They don't have two ports...they are SAS connectors and you get 4xSATA to every one SAS port. You use breakout cables like these.
Click to expand...
Ahhhh. Fuck I'm dumb. Sorry. That looks much better.
 
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Just FYI I have the IO Crest like cards (syba also) and they work but be warned they are only at best 1x or 2x cards so they will be slow especially for things like copying from one drive on the card to another drive on the same card. I use it with FlexRAID RAID-F and the cards are the main bottle neck. I am considering getting an LSI 9211-8i because it's 8x PCI-E after I finish my new Threadripper build.
 
LurkerLito said:
Just FYI I have the IO Crest like cards (syba also) and they work but be warned they are only at best 1x or 2x cards so they will be slow especially for things like copying from one drive on the card to another drive on the same card. I use it with FlexRAID RAID-F and the cards are the main bottle neck. I am considering getting an LSI 9211-8i because it's 8x PCI-E after I finish my new Threadripper build.
Click to expand...

I have one in my file server. They work great. The IBM card is nice because it is usually cheaper than an LSI card, but it has the same controller on it. You can cross flash it to the LSI card if you want.
 
Great info from everyone so far, thanks! So, random question then, when you start getting to that many drives, whether or not through 2 addin cards or 1 card + motherboard ports, are there any possible bottlenecks based on CPU, Memory or even Chipset I should be thinking about.
 
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