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So one of the more interesting things about SATA II is that you can have 4-port multipliers. I saw this article over at INQ showing a 8 port SATA II RAID card, with 4-port multipliers, for a total of 32 drives attached to one RAID card...
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=18486
In a shocking turn of events, they were actually showing this card running with, wait for it, 32 S-ATA drives on it. The eight pretty red cables each go into a box you can't see, and 4 more little red cables come out of that. They run into the big black box that is sitting on top of the card, and connect to the drives in there.
Hmm... imagine 32, 48, or even 64 drives (8, 12, and 16 port cards), at 400GB per drive, thats 12TB, 18TB and 24TB respectively (assuming RAID 5 plus one or two hot spare drives)....
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=18486
In a shocking turn of events, they were actually showing this card running with, wait for it, 32 S-ATA drives on it. The eight pretty red cables each go into a box you can't see, and 4 more little red cables come out of that. They run into the big black box that is sitting on top of the card, and connect to the drives in there.
Hmm... imagine 32, 48, or even 64 drives (8, 12, and 16 port cards), at 400GB per drive, thats 12TB, 18TB and 24TB respectively (assuming RAID 5 plus one or two hot spare drives)....