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Need help finding motherboard with most SATA ports for NAS
Howdy all,
I'm looking to build a NAS at home, and have a shwackload of hard drives I need to hook up to it.
I'm aware of PCI cards to give myself more SATA ports, but I'm hitting a wall trying to find the motherboard with the most ports (ATX).
I know we have some hardware nuts in here, any help would be much appreciated!
Comments
Budget?
The number of SATA ports built in the modern chipsets is usually 6. There are boards with more SATA ports, but they are more expensive.
So what's your budget?
http://pcpartpicker.com/
Currently under maintenance
When its back up (shouldn't be long), its worth a look
It's back up now.
14 SATA Ports
@rds100 $1000
@Adduc Looks great, thanks! (EDIT: Reviews don't look too hot, but still on the list)
@Andre Awesome, I'll keep checking it
backplane, anyone?
$1000 is a good budget. There is always the option to buy a RAID card.
Also there are some "sata port multipliers" but i haven't tried any of these myself.
Just buy a couple raid cards, better performance, and reliability.
http://kom.aau.dk/~pmr/StumbleUpon/SATA-backplane/
herpaderp
@BradND
This would be dependant on if you are seeing reads or writes, normal softraid is usually far easier to work with for smaller setups. Oh, and no additional point of failure.
IBM M1015 reflashed into 9240-IT mode + 1-2x CHENBRO 28 Port SAS Expander Card.
M1015 supports 8 drives or 2x miniSAS connectors. Each expander converts 1x miniSAS to 4x miniSAS (or 16x SATA/SAS drives). 32 drives with just 1 card.
I don't think it's reasonable to try and stuff as many smallish HDDs (of various performance, capacity and age) into a computer as you can. Consider selling all of those and then getting yourself 4-8 nice new 2-3TB drives to run a RAID on. You can run software RAID5/RAID6 with mdadm, that way you don't need expensive RAID cards. And then just about any motherboard with 6 SATA ports, a 2-4 port SATA controller, and you're good to go.
+1
run this on a couple of file servers - easily doable in your budget
@rm_ I have 10 full 2TB and 3TB drives (same brand), and that's without RAID, so I need to do that ASAP, while adding more drives on top.
@Kenshin @prae5 Thanks for the suggestion, I'm going to speak with someone more knowledgeable in that department to help me understand what's needed to do with those =b
good find
Those M1015 used to be so cheap! I think they're the only IT related thing I've bought that has actually risen in price haha.
@Dozn Keep in mind that that ASUS board probably isn't standard ATX.
Yeah like less then 65$.
8 ports, $87: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128572
I just bought this board a couple of weeks ago and am thoroughly satisifed with it.
there is a guy here who is selling some lsi sata cards pretty cheap.
http://minneapolis.craigslist.org/csw/syd/3665890663.html
http://minneapolis.craigslist.org/csw/syd/3660992170.html
http://minneapolis.craigslist.org/csw/syd/3660887985.html
Because they're PCI-X, not PCI-E.... all PCI-X cards are cheap. I just bought an LSI PCI-X RAID card for one of our servers for $20 off ebay with cache and good BBU.
The only bad thing about this is that it uses 2.5" drives, otherwise that's a great price
Ooops didn't catch that.