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ASRock's X99 Extreme11 Has 18 SATA Ports

By - Source: ASRock | B 23 comments

ASRock's latest motherboard can drive up to 18 SATA devices.

If you're someone who likes storage -- but like, really likes storage -- ASRock might just have the right motherboard for you. Today, the company announced its X99 Extreme11, which has a staggering 18 SATA ports.

The rest of the board is actually quite well-rounded. It comes with the LGA2011-3 socket, which is wired to the X99 Express chipset and eight DDR4 memory slots for quad-channel memory configurations. Power is fed to the CPU through a very tough 12-Phase VRM design.

You'll also find five PCI-Express 3.0 x16 slots, which are wired through two PLX 8747 bridge chips to allow all four installed graphics cards to have access to 16 PCI-Express lanes each. To deliver extra power to the motherboard, there is also a 4-pin Molex connector near the rear I/O.

Of the 18 SATA ports, 10 are SATA3 ports from the Intel X99 Express chipset, while the other eight are SAS ports stemming from the LSI SAS 3008 controller, although you can hook up SATA 3 drives to these without issue. Just to rub in how many SATA ports this is, ASRock even included a picture of them all next to each other, which is taller than half of the E-ATX size motherboard. Thankfully, they are angled sideways, and not upwards. Who wants to build a monster RAID-0 array with this?

If for some reason you want more storage beyond what the numerous SATA ports provide, the motherboard has two Ultra M.2 slots, which are fed by four PCI-Express 3.0 lanes each.

Of course, things don't end there. ASRock also fitted the rear I/O of the board with four USB 2.0 ports, four USB 3.0 ports (with four more accessible through front I/O headers), two eSATA ports, a legacy PS/2 port, dual Intel Gigabit Ethernet, and lastly, 8-channel HD audio jacks, which are wired to the Purity Sound 2 hardware.

Now, to find a case in which we can fit this many drives.

Anyway, ASRock did not reveal pricing or availability, but to expect the X99 Extreme11 to cost anything less than $500 is nothing short of a pipe dream.

Follow Niels Broekhuijsen @NBroekhuijsen. Follow us @tomshardware, on Facebook and on Google+.

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  • 9 Hide
    firefoxx04 , October 9, 2014 11:19 AM
    2 Optical drives, 2 SSD and 14 4TB hard drives. Why not?

  • 0 Hide
    zxt827 , October 9, 2014 12:21 PM
    Enough Storage for the entire life?
  • 1 Hide
    jtcorbeil , October 9, 2014 1:15 PM
    would rather have 16 SSD's Raid Striped with 1 optical drive and 1 - 4TB drive
  • Add your comment Display all 23 comments.
  • 7 Hide
    Daniel Ladishew , October 9, 2014 1:39 PM
    I really need to see Tom's test this mobo with a full load of attached drives in multiple RAID modes. Then I could die an go to Geek heaven.
  • 3 Hide
    zhunt99 , October 9, 2014 1:58 PM
    Must have PCI Express x16 sata expansion cards as well
  • 0 Hide
    zhunt99 , October 9, 2014 2:06 PM
    Must have PCI Express x16 sata expansion cards as well
  • -1 Hide
    lp231 , October 9, 2014 2:32 PM
    Not sure about that fan on the PCH. The air flow from the front intake fans on the case can cool it down or use a spot fan.
  • 3 Hide
    wysir , October 9, 2014 2:44 PM
    Maybe this will move the market to start producing 10-12 sata ports as standard counts
  • -4 Hide
    Shneiky , October 9, 2014 3:04 PM
    ASrock completely dropped the ball with X99 and 97. Ugliest boards I have seen from them. Old Z68, Z77, X79 and Z87 were very beautiful boards.
  • 2 Hide
    sea monkey , October 9, 2014 3:09 PM
    Quote:
    Now, to find a case in which we can fit this many drives.


    Cooler Master Cosmos 2 with an Icy Dock FatCage.

    http://www.overclock.net/t/1199098/cooler-master-cosmos-2-club/5000_100#post_21847396
  • 0 Hide
    Tanyac , October 9, 2014 4:24 PM
    Well, that should provide enough storage for the next 12 months if Use 6TB drives. We're gonna need more though by 2016... Just kidding.. Holy mackerel!
  • 0 Hide
    osiris11235 , October 9, 2014 4:29 PM
    Well, considering that I have 2 SSDs (RAID 0 array) and 5 HDDs (2 RAID 0 arrays) in my current mobo, and am running short on space (14.5 TB isn't enough), this is making me salivate :D 
  • 0 Hide
    TechyInAZ , October 9, 2014 7:52 PM
    My goodness, only data servers would need that many drives.
  • 0 Hide
    mapesdhs , October 9, 2014 7:55 PM

    Similar design to the X79 Extreme11, but that was spoiled by the SAS
    controller not having any cache RAM. Have they done the same thing
    again with this board? Without at least a 1GB cache, 4K I/O through
    the SAS controller is pretty awful (I tested this with various SAS PCIe
    cards). The price of the previous Extreme11 was too high aswell.

    Ian.

  • 0 Hide
    bambiboom , October 10, 2014 3:53 AM
    Gentlemen?

    This is an interesting piece of hardware with so many features, it's impossible to categorize- limit- it's application- workstation / server is more likely, but high performance gaming is entirely possible. It's multiple personalities are apparent in this YouTube video, produced by ASRock:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yt0xtBc-z7w&feature=youtu.be

    > in which an Extreme11 is used with an 18-core Xeon E5-2699 v3 (2.3 /3.6GHz, $2,800) 128GB of DDR4 RAM, M.2 Ultra PCIe SSD's, 18 various SSD's, and 4X GTX 780TI in SLI that include active bridges (PLX PEX 8487) that allows all four GPU's to run at 16X. There are a lot of benchmarks in this test, the most impressive of which is a total of 8.4GB/s transfers and 2.8GB/s from the two M.2 Ultra PCIe drives alone. The other benchmarks are not particularly meaningful to me (3D Mark Firestrike Extreme of 16216?) as they are relative scores and in some cases compared to hardware two or three generations past- i7-3930 for example. Still- very impressive, and the X99 chipset and LGA2011-3 appears to be a winner.

    The Extreme11, having Xeon and DDR4 ECC support, 2X amazingly fast M.2 Ultra and so many SATA3 and SAS ports, run by an LSI controller, the line up of PCIe x16 that could accommodate either multiple GPU's and/or GPU coprocessors, suggest very high-end workstation/server use, but it appears it will do well at about anything. The one limitation is that it accommodates one CPU, but the new series of 8, 10, 12, 14, and 18 core Xeons address the issue for highly threaded applications.

    I'd enjoy seeing test of a system set up for the most demanding WS applications. I don't think I could ever use such a system to it's full potential, and justify the $15-20,000 - and $40,000 of appropriate software that a full-bore system would cost, but I also enjoy watching F1 racing in which the cars have $70,000 steering wheels. Perhaps Tom's might have an X99 test festival?

    N.Broekhuijsen requests ideas for a proper case for this board and I would suggest:

    http://www.caselabs-store.com/magnum-sth10/

    > a CaseLabs Magnum STH10 that with optional fittings can incorporate 48 drives.

    BambiBoom

  • 0 Hide
    teholdsedare , October 10, 2014 7:37 AM
    YAY finally a reason to use my 20+ 80 GB sata drives...?
  • -2 Hide
    Haravikk , October 10, 2014 8:02 AM
    Why would you want this? I'm already of the opinion that large amounts of internal storage are pretty much redundant; if you want speed then you can fit a couple of SSDs in a case, if you want capacity then you're better off with a dedicated external enclosure where you can get enough hot-swap bays to justify it. Plus, that amount of ports has to have a serious bottleneck somewhere anyway, either that or you're starving the PCIe slots of bandwidth, at which point, what are you really doing with your storage if you can't provide the GPU clout to process to the monstrous video files that are the only real reason you'd need it?
  • 1 Hide
    hajila , October 10, 2014 8:34 AM
    You can buy used 60gb ssd's for almost nothing. Stripe a dozen of them bad boys together and you'd have one hell of a rig.
  • 0 Hide
    hajila , October 10, 2014 8:34 AM
    error
  • 0 Hide
    RealBeast , October 12, 2014 10:57 AM
    If you can afford this board and a pile of SSDs to use those ports, you can afford a good RAID card.

    While the board has many nice features, that many SATA ports are really not very useful with the exception of building a FreeNAS box, but then a cheap board and a couple of M1015 HBAs would make a lot more sense IMO.
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