Socket 939 Sata Question.....

[Alty]

Heya Peeps, anyone know of any 939 mobos with more than the standard 4 SATA ports onboard? I heard a rumour that there are ones out there with 8 ports but is this true? I am not fussed whether they are SATA or SATA2 compliant - jus looking for a mobo with as many SATA ports as poss.

Any suggestions?

 

[split]

If your talking Nforce4 (PCI-Express) then there are a few.
Errr Asus A8N-SLi Deluxe nForce4 SLi has dual raid, therefore it has 8 sata ports.
Storage/ RAID nForce4 Storage:
- 4 x SATA 3Gb/s
- 2 x UltraDMA 133/100/66/33
- NVRAID : RAID0, RAID1, RAID 0+1 and JBOD span cross SATA and PATA
Silicon Image 3114R RAID controller:
- 4 x Serial ATA with RAID0, 1, 0+1, 5 (RAID
See the eight here four red / four black.

There are a few others such as this which has 8 as well (all yellow)

High end boards have this, as they use the Nvidia SATA, and also a Silicon Image sata controller.
You will pay more for it tho.

I will also say this...if your thinking of going for a mass of RAID using onboard sata controller, a dedicated card is a lot faster, but it's gonna cost you half the price of a mobo or more

 

[Alty]

I am basically looking to get upto 3Tb of mass storage using SATA drives. I have bought 9 Coolermaster Cooldrive 6s to put in my CM Stacker (probably for vanity as much as actual effectiveness I suppose!) and as I replace my current IDE drives with 250/300Gb SATA drives then my mass storage monster will be complete

As for performance, I can quite easily imagine that a dedicated SATA controller card would be more efficient but speed/etc is not an issue so surely the onboard will do fine?

**EDIT** thankyou for your thoughts and comments

 

[split]

IIRC it's when you raid lots of disc you get the cacheing slow down with onboard which is understandable.

Good luck with the project.

 

[Arcane]

My DFI has 8 sata ports, 4 nvidia and 4 silicon image.