Dumb sata question?

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Last response: October 27, 2009 6:41 PM in Storage

grither

October 25, 2009 12:37:06 PM

I am building a pc for myself and need a lot of storage because my pc is also a media server to my home theater

I am looking at a lian li case with 10 internal drive bays. I am also looking at a mobo with 10 sata ports

my question is: does each drive or hdd need a sata port on the mobo? in the 'old' days you could run 2 devices off 1 IDE port but I assume sata is one port to one device? or can you chain devices?

any help is appreciated. i have been thinking that I need a mobo with a lot of ports but I guess if devices can be chained then I only need 5 or 6 ports...

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STHellRaiser

October 25, 2009 3:23:13 PM

so far i have only seen sata working 1 to 1, but if u need more port u could always but a pci sata thingy (forgot name lol)

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sminlal

Storage Expert

October 25, 2009 4:17:09 PM

SATA allows only one drive per port. Your best bet for a large storage array is probably to buy a RAID card. SATA "port multipliers" are available but channeling multiple drives through one SATA connection could cause a bottleneck.

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Paperdoc

Storage Expert

October 27, 2009 6:41:25 PM

Even if you go with 1.5TB drives (They are cheaper per GB than 2.0 TB units), you can still get 12 GB in a mobo with 8 SATA ports. How much space do you need? If it is more than that, consider an NAS case that will hold many more drives and simply attach as another network device. Or even more than one NAS case. By the way, once you get to about 20 drives you may run out of letter names.

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