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Best motherboard for multiple sata drives

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elitesystem   05-19-2008 at 02:09:00 PM

I want to build a incremental online backup system using PCBACKUP running under LINUX. I need to put 6 x 1Tbyte SATA drives in a high end tower non-mirrored. There will actually be two systems functioning as mirrors of one another. This is for an automated office network backup for disaster recovery. I would appreciate some recommendations for motherboards supporting that many drives. I'll be running a core duo Intel processor. Memory will be adequate at 2Gigs and graphics needs are minimal.

Any thoughts are appreciated.

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liljone   05-19-2008 at 02:18:47 PM
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use a server mobo


Message edited by liljone on 05-19-2008 at 02:19:25 PM
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rwpritchett   05-19-2008 at 02:56:14 PM
- 0 +

There's plenty of motherboards out there with 6+ SATA connectors. Here's one that has cheap onboard video that would work:

ASUS P5E-VM DO LGA 775 Intel Q35 Micro ATX Intel Motherboard - Retail $117

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Bronze CPUs badge MU_Engineer   05-19-2008 at 11:58:37 PM
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elitesystem wrote :

I want to build a incremental online backup system using PCBACKUP running under LINUX. I need to put 6 x 1Tbyte SATA drives in a high end tower non-mirrored. There will actually be two systems functioning as mirrors of one another. This is for an automated office network backup for disaster recovery. I would appreciate some recommendations for motherboards supporting that many drives. I'll be running a core duo Intel processor. Memory will be adequate at 2Gigs and graphics needs are minimal.

Any thoughts are appreciated.



If the data partitions on the drives are all independent (e.g. /dev/sda1 -> /backup1, /dev/sdb1 -> /backup2, /dev/sdc1 -> /backup3), then any motherboard with six SATA ports would be your best solution as the drives will likely not all be having I/O at the same time. However, if you want to run RAID, I'd say put in a discrete PCIe x4 or better RAID controller card as six 1 TB drives having simultaneous I/O will bottleneck any southbridge's SATA ports. The most I have seen southbridge SATA ports be able to handle is roughly 200 MB/sec, which is about two of those 1 TB disks slinging data around at the same time. A decent PCIe x8 SATA controller card should be able to handle five times that much fairly easily.

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TechnologyCoordinator   05-20-2008 at 02:52:06 AM
- 0 +

I agree with MU, you may want to go with a discreet RAID controller if RAID is what you're doing.

Pretty sweet storage system. I thought I was cool stuff with my 640gb RAID array.

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Vertigon   05-20-2008 at 11:46:49 AM
- 0 +

"I thought I was cool stuff with my 640gb RAID array"

Haha. I thought I was slick with my dual 500G Raid 0 setup. This is the first time I have ever run Sata and striped raid, I normally just go for a fast SCSI for a workstation but I have to say it works very well. I set the stripe size to 64bit and the drives seems to thump a bit. Hope they last. Then again they are seagates.

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