Need moar SATA ports!

[Agent0range]

I've been running Windows Home Server on a slim micro ATX ASUS P5 box, and it wasn't until recently that I realised I've only got two SATA ports on the motherboard, but I do have an eSATA out on the rear I/O plate.

I want to add another 1Tb drive (or possibly a new 1.5Tb) to expand my current set-up but I'm unsure what to do. As I see it, my options are:

• Get a PCI 4 port SATA Expansion card
• Replace the mobo with a less cut down value one (and probably have the issue with WHS needing re-activation or not reactivating because its an OEM version).
• Use the rear eSATA port and route the cable into the case to the drive in the front.

Would the PCI expansion card noticeably suck in terms of read/write speed etc? If I did go eSATA, would the performance be comparable with a direct onboard SATA header?

The eSATA would only be a temporary measure of course, I'll no doubt be faced with the same dilemma if I used the eSATA in 8-10 months once that new drive is full.

Thanks in advance.

 

[jimmy29]

You would lose a bit of performance with a PCI card but it's still reasonable. I get a solid 25-30MB/s off my fileserver which has PCI SATA cards and a PCI gigabit Ethernet card so you should see performance around that mark or better.
I guess it depends how long your new drive will last you. If you'll be needing another one soon after your external port is used then go for the PCI card now.

 

[fobose]

Go for the PCI controller now. My main PC acts as a file server and I ran out of sata ports (it has 6, but 1 is used by the DVDRW and another is blocked by my graphics card), there are 2 e-SATA ports on the back controller by a jMicron controller but this is rubbish and makes my sound stutter, so its been disabled.

I bought a cheap PCI-E 2 port sata card for £11 and its been rock solid. I have just removed my 500GB RAID 1 array to give me another 500GB of storage untill the 1.5TB drives have come down in price a bit! I am using my bros 500GB external to have a "backup" of the data that was on the RAID 1 array but I still have 500GB of free space now that I will lose (once full) if the drive fails

 

[Agent0range]

Right, cool - so if I bought something along the lines of this from OcUK I wouldn't necessarily need to configure it for a RAID array, I could just plug it in and use it to hook up the additional storage? That card says it supports JBOD's so I'd be alright just hooking them up without creating a RAID array and WHS would do its thing presumably.

 

[jimmy29]

Yeah you can just hookup drives and use them individually. JBOD is something different, it combines the disks into one logical volume, but I don't recommend using it as a drive failure can cause issues on the other disks.

 

[fobose]

Bare in mind that raid controller is PCI-E, and if your motherboard only has PCI you will need to get the PCI version that ocuk sell!