I’m looking at some common desktop motherboards and a lot of them only have like 2 or 4 SATA ports. (But do have other M.2 or PCIe slots.)
How do people connect 10 hard drive disks to something like this? Or do I have to purchase an Enterprise Server Motherboard to support this use case?
I’m trying to build my own NAS/media center and I want a ton of storage.
I think you’ll want to factor in the exact use case at that scale. Does speed matter? Is “a ton” really a ton? Last regular computer mainboard I bought has 6 SATA ports. And I think that’s a fairly common amount. If I look at current harddrives, best price per gigabyte should be somewhere around 14TB drives. So given a RAID5, that’s 70TB of storage, or 80TB if you go for 16TB hdds.
I think once you go considerably beyond that, and you don’t want to lose your data, you should think about buying proper hardware. I mean people do all kinds of crazy stuff, and at some point I extended my storage by simply plugging in 2 large external USB disks. And that worked surprisingly well… But these solutions aren’t super reliable. And neither are the cheap port expanders from Amazon.