Adding more Hard Drives

atheos

atheos

atheos

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So my media PC has an Evga 680i Motherboard.

I have six HD's attached to the six Sata Port's that the Mobo has. 3x3TB & 3x1TB

What are my options to add another drive?

AFAIK one is only able to run one drive off one port so a SATA power splitter cable is out of the question.

So that leaves me with buying a PCI-e x1 Controller Card?

If that is my only options could i get a recommendation for a good one.

If all else fails i could just replace the 1TB drives with 3TB drives i guess

Cheers folks
 
You can get 2 and 4 port SATA PCIe cards easily enough, and then keep the drives all internal. Desktop drives get a bit warm inside 3.5" cases, tidier to keep them all internal if you have enough drive bays.
 
I invested in a LSI MegaRAID SAS 9240-8i SGL Controller Card - (OEM) RAID from OCUK and set up 3TB and 6TB Mirrors. A couple of data cables and power splitters later and all i'm all set up and now I can migrate the card to any future upgrade.
 
ive tried all the options for my media pc...im up yo 8 internal and 5 external..

Here are a few rules of thumb/suggestions
Steer clear of USB 2.0...sata is better then USB 3.0 for all but the most temporary/cost constrained solutions.
If your case can physically support more 3.5 disks then a cheap sata II card will provide more internal sata ports without bottle necking the drives.
External 4 port esata caddies seem to have gone up in price..1 bought a startech for £100 but they seen to have gone up since then closer to £200 - good as a temporary solution - did not want to rebuild PC.
Cards with External sata ports need to support multipath to attach multiple bay enclosures.
External enclosures can be noisy with small 40mm fans.., look for ones with 120 MM fans if your use case is sensitive to noise.. beware they may have leds which you can not switch off (not good in a dark room watching media).
External Enclosures can be very portable/more portable than large cases - useful in some data replication scenarios.
If you have the time, a larger case with an add in card is probably more functional and no more expensive, than an external enclosure. If you think your HDD requirements may exceed the cases capacity in future, buy an add in card with additional external multipath aware esata ports.
Most media server applications are not HDD performance constrained, but if you are regularly moving a lot of data between multiple drives concurrently, the more expensive LSI and Adaptec cards do perform better and allow all drives to read and write at their maximum speed.
The Magnetic HDD industry is promising some capacity gains this year after many years of near flatlining, so i would leave hdd purchases until last minute and not purchase early as hopefully prices will be coming down per tb.
if you are space constrained and do not want additional enclosures/larger case, then replacing the 1tb with 6tb is currently the best balance of cost per tb/per drive bay.
 
Cheers for the superb advice folks. Best forum for advice ever!

I think i will go for a pci-x sata add on card. Plug in one of the 1TB drives into it, and use the onboard SATA port that i freed up.
 
atheos said:
Cheers for the superb advice folks. Best forum for advice ever!

I think i will go for a pci-x sata add on card. Plug in one of the 1TB drives into it, and use the onboard SATA port that i freed up.
Click to expand...

are you getting a sata 3 or sata 2 pcie card? guess it would be sata 2 as its got a HDD
 
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