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.
[Guide] NAS Killer 6.0 - DDR4 is finally cheap - Builds / [LGA1151,LGA1200] NAS Killer 6.0, Plex QSV Builds - serverbuilds.net Forums
https://forums.serverbuilds.net/t/guide-nas-killer-6-0-ddr4-is-finally-cheap/13956
Hopefully this resource is handy for you - I’m going through the same process at the moment.
Ignore the peeps saying not to use a regular pci-e card. Old recc, ASmedia ones are ideal good for 4-6 ports. 8+ you need to dabble in LSI shenanigans. The ASmedia ones use way less power and are worth it if you don’t need 8+ ports. You get all the features you want, they look and act like real SATA ports.
Check these guides (not just applicable to unraid, I don’t use unraid, but they cater towards a “ez straightforward” crowd so they make relatively concise and vetted info dumps):
https://forums.unraid.net/topic/102010-recommended-controllers-for-unraid/
DO NOT USE REGULAR PCI-E CARDS THAT ADD SATA PORTS. Many are unreliable. What you want is called a SAS Host Bus Adapter card and you want to get one that’s pre-flashed in IT mode.
The LSI 9207 is a good choice.
Make sure you get the correct SAS to SATA cables and you are set. You can add 8 to 16 SATA drives with a single, high speed, and reliable card.
Piggybacking off this, it’s worth noting if you’re adding SAS capability to your PC via one of these cards, you can look into used enterprise SAS HDDs for cheap. They’re often sold in bulk - I just picked up 72TB (12x6TB) of 7200RPM drives for AUD480 total. Availability is very region-specific and of course it’s up to you to decide if it’s worth the risk for your needs, but if you’re using RAID6 or equivalent (capable of handling two dead drives at once) the risk is minimal. Be sure to buy from sellers with a warranty (12 months minimum), and check the drives once they arrive. But in general enterprise drives are MUCH more resilient than consumer drives.
Good to know, thank you.
I’m running 2 LSI cards, got an 8 and 16 for my NAS/mini rack, would recommend.
+1 on the LSI cards, I’ve been running one for a year or so now
That sent me down a rabbit hole and I learned a lot, thank you
An HBA does not need to be flashed. A RAID controller does, so that it performs as an HBA and not a RAID controller.
You’re looking for an HBA card flashed into IT mode. There’s a lot of LSI branded cards that can accomplish this. Just do a quick search on eBay and you’ll see tons of different options.
Sorry, on mobile and couldn’t find a good link for ya.
I have a PCI expansion card with 2x SAS ports, each of which can connect 4x SATA HDDs with a cable adapter.
I got a used Dell H200 for $30, because it’s good enough and the ports face UP instead of backwards, which is good for my itx case
Consider splitting your compute and storage. A dedicated NAS and the connect your compute to it using nfs or iSCSI.
There are M.2 adapters that split out 5 SATA ports. I don’t know about their chipsets and whether they require cooling though.
No, those are terrible.
Some pcie cards can add a buuunch more sata ports. There are also some m.2 cards that can do this.
PCIE cards exist that expand SATA data plugs. I don’t know the ins and outs though, as far as bandwidth goes. It also means you need a power supply that can provide enough power and daisy chained cords.
since you’re buying parts, you can specifically look for boards with 6-8 (more than that will require a ‘specialty’ board). 8 isn’t impossible to find. start a build on pcpartpicker, go straight to motherboards and filter 8 or more ‘SATA 6Gb/s Ports’, then sort low-to-high on price. you should find a msi pro am4 and an asus prime am5 that are quite reasonably priced and have multiple reputable vendors selling them.
otherwise you’re looking for an expansion card to add to a board you’ve already got or to expand one of those above for even more.
of course, you need the drive bays to hold them all, too. which can be harder to find at a reasonable and affordable price than motherboards and controller cards.
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.
