Storage Server Mobo with lots of SATA ports?

A

Alai

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What's a good storage server mobo with lots of SATA ports? Like.... 15x SATA ports or something? I want to use the Cosmos S or Cosmos 1000 and have about 10x hard drives and 2 optical drives or so.
 
There are 6 lga 1156 desktop boards that support 10 SATA ports on newegg. I recommend the ASUS or Gigabyte ones. I do not see any other combination with that many or more ports.
 
It'd probably be easier to go with a board that has enough PCI or PCI-E slots to install some of those 8 port Supermicro SATA controllers in.
 
another vote for

a motherboard of your choice plus an eight-port HBA card (or two)
 
I assume the problem with a raid card is cost and unneeded hardware raid feature. Those darn 12 port cards cost more than an entire server.. For me I have wrestled with this for years. Now for the most part I get a motherboard with 8 sata ports. Use them all for linux software raid. And buy an entire second system if I need more storage. The second system would still cost less than a 12+ port card and with linux software raid and a modern machine hardware raid is completely unnecessary. I mean so with software raid 6 you can only write at 330MB/s on a 4 year old AMD 5000+ dual core. The bottleneck is the gigabit nic(s) not the raid.
 
drescherjm said:
I assume the problem with a raid card is cost and unneeded hardware raid feature. Those darn 12 port cards cost more than an entire server..
Click to expand...

indeed

good are damn expensive
there's little point in paying for features that aren't required

though the OP didn't say whether they want RAID
 
slots to install some of those 8 port Supermicro SATA controllers in.
Click to expand...

Those are a very good value. Hopefully next time I need this I can buy them at the "approved" vendor..
 
Thank you all for your input thus far. I really like the SATA controller idea. The 1156 mobo with 10 SATA and one Supermicro SATA controller might be good, but then that costs alot of money. Maybe I will just grab a 775 mobo and two SATA controller.

I don't really have need for RAID nor do I want to deal with the expenses and setup effort of a RAID setup.
 
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