Hi,

Can anyone recommend a motherboard that is suitable for heavy i/o? There's two scenarios which I'm concerned about:

- Moving hundreds of gigs of data (thousands of files), around 15-20mb each, between hard drives

- Moving hundreds of thousands of little small files (around 4 kilobytes to 600 kilobytes, in various folders) between hard drives.

Currently the little junky PC I have can handle the 15-20mb files but the hundreds of thousands of files seems to cause a problem around 500,000-600,000 files after which point I need to restart the computer if I want to continue copying.

Most of the time I would be moving from an internal HD to an external, USB connected, HD. Could go the other way though and could go between internal HD's too.

I'm looking for a board that would work with an Core 2 Duo processor, maybe a quad but more like just a duo. I'd prefer an intel chipset as the chipset in the PC that isn't working is an nvidia so I'm thinking I'd like to avoid it.

I need at least one firewire port but not having one isn't the end of the world if someone can recommend a good PCI card.

I'd like to have several SATA ports on the mobo as I'll be connecting as many internal HD's as I can fit in the case. Don't need raid, just want plenty of connections so I can avoid buying card to add more connections.

Gigabit ethernet would be handy as well; don't need wireless.

Don't need to worry about graphics. This isn't a gaming machine and I can use onboard graphics or any cheap card. It's a machine for batch processing images, saving either to internal or external HD, but mainly for copying stored files from internal HDs to external ones.

I won't be overclocking.

I'd appreciate any advice on which mobo to get as that seems to be my biggest hurdle in putting together a new system. Too many choices!

Thanks

If you are into heavy stuff like that, i would recommend going for SAS drives. SAS stands for Serial Attached SCSI. Basibally it's a SCSI drive with a sata like connector. ASUS have a few motherboards with SAS controllers. This might be your best bet for the type of useage that you will be doing. BTW if you get a motherboard with SAS controller, it is backwards compatible with SATAII drives.

Hope that helped a little.

Yah - SAS is expensive. But if heavy I/O is what you're after, then that's clearly the ticket.

Expensive is right, yikes! I see a 750 GB model on the Seagate web site but can't find that part number in any of the places in usually buy from. Biggest I saw was a 300gb version and that wasn't cheap. That's going to break the budget for sure.

I think I can get away with SATA drives because I'm not running this stuff 24/7/365. I'm looking to avoid having to babysit the computer and restart it several times during the hundreds of thousands of files copy. If I was doing this all day every day then I might agree I need a better HD but since it's not every day and the bottleneck will always be copying to those external USB drives, I'm pretty sure SATA will work fine for me.

Just want to find something I can rely on and will work. So many different model of mobo, not sure which one to pick. Don't want to get a new machine only to have it do the same stuff as this one.

Thanks