8 port sata hub

That depends. As far as I know, there is no such thing as an SATA hub. That's the bad news.

The good news is that _some_ SATA controllers can control several drives per port - I think that the limit is five, but I may be off by a thousand. Take a look here: http://www.serialata.org/technology/port_multipliers.as...

The bad news is that most SATA controllers don't support this. If you can look at the motherboard specs, you can see if the controller supports this or not. If not, your choices include

Buy a motherboard that does

Buy an add-in SATA controller with either 8 ports or support for port multipliers.

Spend a ton of money to buy a RAID device that does hardware RAID, takes eight drives, and will connect to your mobo with a single ESata connection. This is, in a sense, an "SATA hub," but a very expensive one.

I'll be blessed. There is (or claims to be) such a thing. Here's the link: http://www.sataport.com/
but the obnoxious site plays a video as soon as you bring it up.

If you want a home server that allows you to connect to MAC, Windows and Linux, you can do with much less cost.

I did a 40TB - NAS runs on freeNAS, consume only ~ 180W of power and transfer over 80MB/sec

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/265641-32-40tb-server...

In this system i use technology that you're looking at - SATA hub 1 to five drives, but with an added features

Since most of built in SATA port DOES NOT support PM ware. it wont see all five drives.

I use a hardware raid one to five port multiplier ware to combine all fives as a SINGLE volume (raid5)

Therefore each of your SATA port will able to see a reliable, rebuilt-able raid volume.

I would use the i7 system for ripping and compress BD and DVD to H.264 codec, because NAS does not need that much of CPU power

FireWire

Sweet product; thanks.

I'm going to post the same warning I always do when RAID comes up - if the controller fries, you can't just attach the disks to another mobo. Or even another model of RAID controller.

Oh yes you can :-) to get the data from raid5, with simply connect to another mobo, the software is cost TOO much.

I would buy SPM393 instead controller SPM394, they use the same raid engine

It's cheaper and works with Windows or MAC