Mobo with a LOT of Sata's

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Im looking for a motherboard with loaaaaaaads of sata connectors, if there is one or i suppose i could get some pci cards.

One of its main uses will be a duplicator and i think Sata's would work best for this.
Needs to very upgradable and stable.

Can anyone recommend me something?

Cheers
 
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If your looking for SATA, you must first decide which type of SATA you are looking for. SATA/ SATA 2 for internal use or e-SATA for external use. e-SATA are used externally in which case you should buy PCI cards. However, for internal use I suggest buying a mother board with SATA 2 ports. SATA 2 is more secure than SATA and the data transfer speed is slightly faster.
 
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Sorry I forgot to mention this before, have a good search and have a good look at the motherboard you are buying because motherboards with loads of SATA ports have less PATA ports (ribbon cable ports) for things like CD and DVD drives. So take that into consideration.
 
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animeguitarist said:
Sorry I forgot to mention this before, have a good search and have a good look at the motherboard you are buying because motherboards with loads of SATA ports have less PATA ports (ribbon cable ports) for things like CD and DVD drives. So take that into consideration.
I was thinking it would be best to use SATA CD/DVD drives because the problem with PATA is, you get some hang time when you insert disks. According to a friend, satas dont do that.

Oh yeah and Sata 2's definately ;)
 
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sWiZzLe said:
I was thinking it would be best to use SATA CD/DVD drives because the problem with PATA is, you get some hang time when you insert disks. According to a friend, satas dont do that.

Oh yeah and Sata 2's definately ;)


That hang time wouldn't be the fault of the IDE cable. It's probably just a newer more efficient drive. Also depends on if its a CD or DVD. For me CDs take around 10 seconds to spin up where as DVDs can be up in just a second or two.
 
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sWiZzLe said:
I was thinking it would be best to use SATA CD/DVD drives because the problem with PATA is, you get some hang time when you insert disks. According to a friend, satas dont do that.

Oh yeah and Sata 2's definately ;)

Nope, I would stick to what I said before. Most modern hard drives are SATA or SATA2 but not many CD or DVD drives are SATA, most still use the old PATA cables. ;)

With regards to the hang time, this only usually happens when you use the same cable to link the CD/DVD drive and the hard drive(s) with the motherboard. This happens because CD/DVD drives process and send data at slower speeds than hard drives. SO, if they are on the same cable (eg. PATA ribbon cable) there will be some hang time.

In conclusion, use a different cable for each of your drives and make sure that the hard drives use SATA2 or SATA if you cant find SATA2.
 
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The amount of time it takes to send the data down the cable is insignificant next to the amount of time it takes to get the data off of the disc.

I'm sitting here installing 5 discs of WoWarcraft, and each one takes about 8 seconds to spin up on my SATA DVD/RW (sigged). The speed of optical drives is totally outstripped by the speed of the interfaces (even UDMA33). There's no requirement to choose SATA over PATA other than aesthetics really. My old drives dying was the reason I got my new one, and I chose SATA because I can see IDE going the way of s939, possibly before this drive dies.
 
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animeguitarist said:
In conclusion, use a different cable for each of your drives and make sure that the hard drives use SATA2 or SATA if you cant find SATA2.
What's the likelyhood of me finding a motherboard with 5 pata controllers on it :eek: One of my reasons for going with sata on this is that each drive would get it's own cable, wouldn't that be better?

I have a new Optiarc pata drive that hangs for about 10 seconds, my hdd are sata so its all alone on the pata cable. Should it hang for longer period of time if the disk is empty?
 
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recently bought a e-Sata external enclosure

and I have a P5-B Deluxe mobo with E-sata on it

is it normal that you have to reboot for the mobo/OS to find the Sata drive - just a bit of a PITA ? unlike USB2/Firewire

Mark.
 

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Buckster said:
recently bought a e-Sata external enclosure

and I have a P5-B Deluxe mobo with E-sata on it

is it normal that you have to reboot for the mobo/OS to find the Sata drive - just a bit of a PITA ? unlike USB2/Firewire

Mark.

I *think* you need to be using AHCI to enable hot-swap. E-SATA is pretty much just a standard SATAII port.
 
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thanks for that :)

since I last tried - I went to Vista and as such enabled AHCI ...

haven't tried since - so will later and let you know the result :)

cheers, MArk.
 
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sWiZzLe said:
What's the likelyhood of me finding a motherboard with 5 pata controllers on it :eek: One of my reasons for going with sata on this is that each drive would get it's own cable, wouldn't that be better?
The speed of the interface outstrips the speed of transfers to and from it so it doesn't make a great deal of difference.

When you have a couple of zippy hard disks copying data back and forth mostly from their caches, that's when the added pace of SATA comes in.
The classic IDE set up is:
Pri Master: Hard disk C: (operating system)
Pri Slave: Empty
Sec Master: Hard Drive D: (Swap file and music/video - files that don't change much)
Sec Slave: CD/DVD

You will always have the time it takes to spin the disc up where the drive can't do anything. Even hard disks do this. If the PC goes into energy saving mode and powers down the hard disk, it won't be able to do anything with the disk until it has spun back up.
This is what you mean by "hang time", isn't it? You're not saying the PC is totally unusable, are you? Because that isn't right, no matter what interface you're using. If you DO mean this, check you're using UDMA on the drive transfer mode tab on it's IDE controller in Device Manager.
 
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Ignoring this 'hang time' stuff.

There will be up to 5 Optical drives and possibly 2 or more hard drives.
For ease of build and upgradability is sata not a good way to go?

Sata drives seem to be a lot cheaper than pata... im begining to wish i hadn't mentioned this hang time lol ;)
 
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yeah, PATA is about to be fased out. Plus, PATA ribbon cables, cutter up the inside of your case and make access to different things while ** building extremely troublesome.

So yes, in terms of the build and upgrade ability, SATA is the way to go. Honnest get SATA drives, they are the way for ward. However, if you choose to ignore this and go for PATA, please, dont use normal ribbbon cables, use round ribbon cables, they are tidier and they make building and upgrade a heck of a lot easier. trust me my DVD/CD drive is PATA and i swapped the cable for a round ribbon cable and it made everything easier, i didnt have this bulky cable making things harder to upgrade.
 
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The GA-N680SLI-DQ6 (rev. 2.0) from Gigabyte as 10 SATA connections.

GA-N680SLI-DQ6

I've always wanted to get one of these boards myself ...just that I'm not willing to fork out another £180 on another board when im doing ok at the moment with my Asus P5B Deluxe....I will buy one of these though because I need more SATA connections myself I'm fed up of having to upload the drives when I want to plug a different one in.


I've always wanted to know why OverclockersUK have never had these boards in, and why theres been not much talk about them on this forum.
 
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