Motherboard With LOADS of SATA Ports

Someone had you in mind

and even

Or indeed 74 options:

Theo

Andy Burns / Theo

That is enormously helpful, thank you :-)

Googling now for "how to google"...

The Z790 LGA1700 14900K DDR5 has eight ports as an option. You could likely build a Win11 solution around a board like this. (The current socket is LGA1851, silicon for LGA1851 CPU going through a respin)

Many of the HEDT are old stock.

On the AMD side, one solution is older and most likely out of stock. There is an X870e with 6 SATA. The previous generation are all gone.

There is really *nothing* in add-on cards worth buying. Nothing that can do 530MB/sec on all ports at the same time. Who wants to pay $125 for a card with port multipliers on it ??? Yikes. The motherboard SATA ports, only a DMI bus limit could limit them. Whereas the add-in cards, they always put inferior PCIe interfaces (not enough bandwidth).

Paul

I decided I couldn't justify the extra cost so surgery commenced at 10:45 to extract Z170P Mobo and replace with known working Z170K.

I am clumsy sadly, size 11.5 feet with hands to match but it went OK, usual fiddle arse issue with front panel connector, by that stage buried next to the PSU and surrounded by cables.

Anyway got there, pressed the tit, one flash of the power light and nothing. Fiddled a bit but no go.

Cup of tea and decided to swap the PSU with a known working. On donor and re-build I had very carefully run the cable so it didn't interfere with air flow so I had to disentangle it.

Anyway into re-build, turned on, straight into BIOS (it doesn't like it when I re-build) and then booted fine.

Said lots of swear words, some of which I didn't know I knew. Will wire up the various accessories this afternoon.

Can't remember the last time a PSU went, it's a Seasonic and doesn't owe me anything after all this time.

The car power pack arrives later, let's hope that boots up too!

You want a proper server-grade host bus adapter (HBA), not a pathetic consumer SATA chip (Asmedia, JMicron, ...). LSI SAS HBAs (which also do SATA) are a good starting point (LSI is now owned by Broadcom), and available used for cheap.

eg the Avago SAS9300-8e has 9600MB/s of SAS bandwidth:

But you do pay for it in extra power consumption (that one is 14W), so a decent motherboard has its advantages.

Also, if this is for spinning rust there's no point in trying to max out PCIe bandwidth because the drives won't handle it. If you're using SSDs it's better to use NVMe. I'd still recommend an HBA over consumer junk for reliability though.

(I managed to overwhelm an nvidia chipset SATA controller once with an unoptimal ZFS setup to the result it just stopped doing anything at all. I put in a HBA and it worked much better. But turned out the nvidia was fine with a more sensible ZFS setup, and the HDD were much less busy too)

Theo

I used to screw the mobo in, then fit the cables. It's logical after all. But, experience has shown it's easier to fit as many cables as possible to the mobo before inserting it into the case. Obviously, that depends on lead lengths and/or dismantling the front panel.