Did I run out of SATA ports?

Discussion in 'Storage Devices' started by Rick Hansen, Dec 28, 2011.

  1. Rick Hansen

    Rick Hansen Geek Trainee

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    Hello,

    I am about to purchase an ITX-sized motherboard so my son and I can build a small portable computer together for light gaming and home theater (it is our father/son Christmas gift). The motherboard is this one (uses the new AMD llano CPU):

    ASUS F1A75-I Deluxe FM1 AMD A75 (Hudson D3) HDMI SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 Mini ITX AMD Motherboard
    http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131789

    Anyway this board has 4 internal SATA ports. But we plan on installing the following SATA devices:

    1) A 128gb SSD dedicated for the operating system (port 1)
    2) A second 128gb SSD for editing video/photo data (port 2)
    3) A pair or 2tb hard drives configured as RAID 1 for storing family video and music securely (ports 3 and 4)
    4) A slim optical blu ray / dvd drive (port ?)
    5) We may also possibly add another SSD and HDD (ports ? and ?)

    Since I have 5 to 7 devices, but only 4 SATA ports do I need to purchase an additiopnal SATA card to create more ports? Or is there a solution that can piggyback more devices on my 4 available SATA ports? (This board has an available PCI express 2.0 slot available but if there is a way to piggyback all my storage on these 4 SATA ports alone I would rather do that and use the PCI slot for something else). The board does not have an IDE port.

    Thanks
     
  2. M_Kincy

    M_Kincy Geek

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    some high end raid controler cards use 1-4 breakout data cables. but for the cheap on-board controler you are limited to one drive per port. My recomendation would be to use an external optical drive since you really don't use them much. also i assume you are using a small case, will it even acomodate 4-5 drives? another solution might be to mod the back side of the case to install a slim external optical in the back, then connect it to an internal USB Header.
     

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