Silly SATA Question

[Paddy]

I havn't seen any SATA cables that have more than two conncetors on them. How do I connect more than two HDs to my mobo?

[DGhost]

with two different cables and two ports?

SATA currently only supports one device per port.

[Paddy]

OK... so I have two SATA drives connected to my Asus A7N8X-E Deluxe mobo... How do I attach more devices? Do i have to buy a seperate SATA controller?

[DGhost]

errm, yeah, i just reread your original question and it makes a bit more sense now...

if your motherboard only has two SATA ports, you can only have two drives. if you want more than what the motherboard has, you need a PCI controller for it. newer motherboards have gotten around this issue by having 4+ SATA ports on them, and eventually the SATA spec will be updated to include "hubs" that you can use.

[Paddy]

Bummer....

Can anyone recommend a good PCI SATA controller?

[ayoub_ibrahim]

hehe, and you thought that ide was old fashioned!

[SpiralDragon]

on the highend adaptec has some realy nice SATA raid controlers that have their own mem and raid proc... and up to 16 stata ports... on the cheep end i would recomend promis tech.. 4 port sata raid controlers.. they are prety good... or intels own home made brew... with an on board proc and mem..

[SpiralDragon]

but got to admit.. even with software stipe set... the improvment in data rates on just 2 drives (and one even) is termendous...

[Ribbit]

Get an SAS controller when they show up

Actually I'm only half-joking. SAS, IIRC, is implemented as a superset of SATA. You can daisy-chain SAS drives together, and you can connect SATA drives up as well. I think you can daisy-chain SATA drives, but don't quote me on that.

Not that any of this helps Paddy right now

[Jammrock]

SATA is designed to only have 1 device per mobo connection. It helps reduce crosstalk problems (less wires), and performace issues like when 2 devices are on the same IDE channel. And with the size of SATA connectors and cables, you really don't need multiple devices per cable.

Jammrock

[az]

Wait till you can get drives and controllers that support nqc. Won't be long now.

AZ

[Fred H]

I have always problems with the single SATA drive in my P4C800-E Deluxe when I go to DOS. I must set the BIOS for compatible mode otherwise it doesn't recognize my DVD drives.
And more. In DOS I had to create a special Ghost.exe file compatibel with the SATA drive. But, I definitly not ghost the system to my SATA drive.
If I will to ghost-back from CD/DVD i need another ghost.exe file + reseting the BIOS. Very irritating.
More: every time I put my hand inside the PC the SATA cable jumps out from the socket. Not so with the IDE cables.
I should go with IDE drives, even with an extra PCI card.
I couldn't find the SATA faster than a good ATA drive.
Tell me if I do something wrong.

Fred

[The PIT]

Funny every recent review about raid for the desktop say theres no real world improvement.

[UtwigMU]

Well if you use other RAID than 0, there's redundancy.

[Wombat]

Originally posted by The PIT
Funny every recent review about raid for the desktop say theres no real world improvement.

It depends what you're doing with it. First, running Windows on RAID doesn't help much, it's got borked RAID settings. Editing them by hand can help.

Second, even a good RAID 1 setup will show some performance benefits if the card is good: they'll stripe the reads.