A computer components & hardware forum. HardwareBanter

If this is your first visit, be sure to check out the FAQ by clicking the link above. You may have to register before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages, select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below.

Go Back   Home » HardwareBanter forum » Motherboards » Gigabyte Motherboards
Site Map Home Register Authors List Search Today's Posts Mark Forums Read Web Partners

Mobo With The Most SATA Connectors? (Intel E7400)



 
 
Thread Tools Display Modes
  #1  
Old April 9th 11, 08:25 PM posted to alt.comp.periphs.mainboard.gigabyte
(PeteCresswell)
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 317
Default Mobo With The Most SATA Connectors? (Intel E7400)

Got an Asus mobo running an "Intel Core2 Duo CPU E7400"... Socket
775LGA.

Running Windows Home Server, and the add-on SATA cards bco
limited number of mobo SATA connectors are becoming a headache.
This board has six SATA connectors.

8 would do the trick right now.

More would be better.... 12? 16?

Anybody know of a board that would take that CPU and offer more
SATA connectors?
--
PeteCresswell
  #2  
Old April 9th 11, 10:19 PM posted to alt.comp.periphs.mainboard.gigabyte
Paul
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 13,364
Default Mobo With The Most SATA Connectors? (Intel E7400)

(PeteCresswell) wrote:
Got an Asus mobo running an "Intel Core2 Duo CPU E7400"... Socket
775LGA.

Running Windows Home Server, and the add-on SATA cards bco
limited number of mobo SATA connectors are becoming a headache.
This board has six SATA connectors.

8 would do the trick right now.

More would be better.... 12? 16?

Anybody know of a board that would take that CPU and offer more
SATA connectors?


Get yourself a port multiplier capable SATA card. This card
has two ports. $27.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16815124027

Add to that, a port multiplier. This typically come with one
host side port, and five peripheral ports. The addressing feature
in the standard, may support something like fifteen drives, but
the device typically used, has five ports. It's set up that way,
for bandwidth reasons.

http://www.cooldrives.com/cosapomubrso.html

If you use two of those, you can control ten drives from the
SIL3132. The SIL3132 comes with software for managing the drives
(the software may support software RAID, but I'm assuming here
it could just as easily offer JBOD for each disk).

I've yet to run into someone who bought one, but it's an option.
If you wanted lots of theoretical bandwidth, that is not the way to
get it.

There are two flavors of port multiplier protocol, and not a lot
of articles on the topic. I picked the SIL3132, because it's one
of the first to be used in such a setup.

*******

Fanout arrangements are also available. For example, Silicon Image
makes 1:2 devices, and you can "span" two disks together, to make
a larger disk. But that is not likely to be exactly what you want.
And the wiring would likely be a mess. The 1:5 of the port multipler
is a bit neater, but the expense is likely the reason nobody is
buying it. I see in a search, that Addonics is making one too.

This is the same idea, but with different packaging.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16816111137

You can see the PM chip, staring out at you from inside the box :-)

http://images17.newegg.com/is/image/newegg/16-111-137-Z08?$S640W$

I believe you can have more than one SIL3132 in a system.

*******

With respect to motherboards, I might expect to see up to about
ten ports. That would be a six port motherboard, and two external
chips of two ports each. That is about all you could reasonably
expect. A few years back, they would throw a SIL3114 on some of the
boards, but I don't think that would be a popular now. Now, you
might get a JMB363 (2 ports) and a Marvell SAS chip (2 ports), plus
a six port Southbridge. And the board might be a bit expensive.

Speaking of which, SAS can fan out to a large number of drives, but
SAS drives are very expensive. So you wouldn't build a "home farm"
with tech like that. A single SAS 15K drive would make a dandy boot
drive, but storage of terabytes of data on such drives, would cost
as much as a small car. Only businesses can afford tech like that.
Or perhaps Bill Gates. For the rest of us, there's SATA.

*******

In terms of sheer number of ports, Areca makes some cards with large
numbers of ports. But a card can cost up to $1000 or so.

For example, $1200 gets you 24 ports. That's $50 per port. (But
it's a high performance card, with many possibilities.) The
port multiplier concept, at about $230 for ten ports, is $23 per port.
And performance is suited to streaming content to other computers,
rather than setting any RAID records. (With the SIL3132, you can
set up soft RAID configurations.)

http://images10.newegg.com/NeweggIma...151-027-04.jpg

The Areca comes with a mix of cables, so you might need to buy a couple more
red ones.

http://images10.newegg.com/NeweggIma...151-027-06.jpg

In years past, some people used to buy multiple SIL3114 PCI cards,
and fill their PCI slots, to build a home server. But modern motherboards
have a pretty crappy mix of slots now, so it's pretty hard to have
cheap fun like that. And you might have trouble finding the cards too,
as SIL3114 is SATA I and that scares some people away. But if all you
want is raw capacity, a SATA I connection is nothing to be concerned
about. It's limited to 125MB/sec or so. The per port cost of
SIL3114 cards, would be a lot lower than the other options.

Example of SIL3114. There are some customer reviews. The card is worth
about $25, so take the "savings" info with a grain of salt.

http://www.amazon.com/SD-SATA-4P-Ser...2383611&sr=8-1

Also, when you see a SIL3114 offer six ports, you know that's crap.
The chip has four ports. A jumper block, allows steering two ports
to the faceplate connector. So only four of six connectors work
at a time. I'd sooner buy the other one, before I'd buy this.
Running SATA signals through a jumper block, is a dumb idea.

http://www.amazon.com/Vantec-6-Port-...2383611&sr=8-3

So you can see, there are some relatively cheap fanout options.

Paul
 




Thread Tools
Display Modes

Posting Rules
You may not post new threads
You may not post replies
You may not post attachments
You may not edit your posts

vB code is On
Smilies are On
[IMG] code is On
HTML code is Off
Forum Jump

Similar Threads
Thread Thread Starter Forum Replies Last Post
repair mobo sata connectors rmbelson Homebuilt PC's 4 January 19th 09 06:44 PM
SATA Case With Four or More SCSI or SATA Connectors on Back? Will Storage & Hardrives 0 January 30th 08 06:42 AM
HDD slow performance with no Intel Sata controller after flashing BIOS with new version (mobo= AB9 PRO) mirtoni Abit Motherboards 0 August 28th 07 02:30 PM
Fan connectors on mobo Rob Hemmings Asus Motherboards 0 November 7th 05 01:40 PM
PATA and SATA together on an Intel 865 mobo. Damon Intel 3 February 8th 05 04:56 AM


All times are GMT +1. The time now is 08:35 AM.


Powered by vBulletin® Version 3.6.4
Copyright ©2000 - 2024, Jelsoft Enterprises Ltd.
Copyright ©2004-2024 HardwareBanter.
The comments are property of their posters.