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need more hard drive slots

S

sjreg1

n00b
Joined
Apr 22, 2011
Messages
22
All six of my hard drive data slots are occupied and I want to add more. There's space for additional drives in the bay, but I'm unsure how to connect them to the mother board somehow.

Would you guys suggest a PCI card with additional slots or building an external enclosure or an entire new system or something else?

Thanks.
 
Most likely your best bet would be a PCIe based SATA or SAS card.

A good choice is an IBM m1015 off eBay. This will add 8 additional SAS / SATA ports. These can be had for less than $75 shipped. Although you need a SFF8087 forward breakout cable which costs around $10 on eBay as well.

Here is an example:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/IBM-ServeRA...sk_Controllers_RAID_Cards&hash=item4ab81d66c8

SFF8087 forward breakout cable
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Mini-SAS-SF...t=US_Drive_Cables_dapters&hash=item2a1c5ec626
 
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:eek:

Holy crap, eight? That's insane, but perfect. Thanks.

Another question - I won't be adding eight more drives, but if I eventually did, can internal drives be mounted externally somehow and connected internally or does that kind of defeat the purpose?
 
There goes 'cheap fix' out the window. Alright, thanks again for your help, gents.
 
Heh, yeah, might actually make sense just to get higher capacity drives and retire any lower capacity ones you're currently using.
 
I've had good luck with the following cards. They are not as fast as Intel motherboard ports but for the price I have found them adequate just to connnect additional drives (JBOD) or for Raid0 scratch disks. I would not recommend them for top tier performance.

PCIe Internal:
http://www.monoprice.com/products/p...=10407&cs_id=1040702&p_id=2530&seq=1&format=2

PCIe eSata
http://www.monoprice.com/products/p...=10407&cs_id=1040702&p_id=3581&seq=1&format=2

PCI Internal:
http://www.monoprice.com/products/p...d=10407&cs_id=1040702&p_id=959&seq=1&format=2
 
Add on card is your only viable option.

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is where I feel Intel has really dropped the ball by instituting a SATA3 port limit of only 2. There's no good reason why we shouldn't have gotten 8-12 native ports on today's Z and X series MoBos. Oh wait, doesn't Intel make SATA add on cards? That explains it...greed.

Hell, I'd be happy with 4 SATA3 and 4 SATA2 native ports on the Intel platforms.
 
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