12 SATA Drives on an 8PENXP

[whytwolf]

I've got a Gigabyte 8PENXP and want to know if it's possible to connect more than 8 SATA drives without running RAID? or connect a combination of SATA and IDE Drives to total about 12 200GB Drives?

 

[whytwolf]

PS: If it's not possible with that board, on which board is it possible to run 10-12 harddrives (SATA or IDE) Possibly the 8KNXP?

 

[Vette73]

Theres only 4 Sata ports on tthat board, so 4 would be the Max SATA drives you can run. You could run another 4 off ther IDE (2 slave and 2 master)

 

[LTC8K6]

Well, you can buy cards to use more drives on any board.

 

[Vette73]

^


Yea if you want to have your HardDrives run slower then on a socket7 board. The PCI bus can only handle 133mhz. Running more then a couple drives with everthing else on it, makes it REALLY slow. 2 of the 4 sata ports are already on the PCI bus.

If you want to add a card then you need to get a board that has and supports 64bit/66Mhz pci ports. Most dual CPU boards have them.

 

[poppagene]

The 8PENXP has 4 sata and 4 ide slots on board. You can run 4 sata connection drives and 8 ide connection drives and they do not have to be in a raid setup.

You could also do this with the 8KNXP.

 

[lobadobadingdong]

if you have enough ide (ata and/or sata) connectors the max for any board is 24 (24 letters in the alphabet) - whatever other drives you have (floppy drive, optical drives, etc.)

 

[jamesbond007]

Yep, for my file server, I have 3 Promise ATA cards (one of them is SATA) and then I also utilize the onboard IDE controller as well. In my particular setup, I have to use the primary/mainboard IDE controller as the boot device, or there is a conflict with the Promise cards.

Speaking of setting up large HDD storage servers, does anyone know of a good case to house 16-20 3.5" IDE drives? I always see the ones that house 5.25" drives/bays (I'm assuming for hot-swap and individual cooling solutions), but never for 3.5" drives.

 

[DerwenArtos12]

Originally posted by: lobadobadingdong
if you have enough ide (ata and/or sata) connectors the max for any board is 24 (24 letters in the alphabet) - whatever other drives you have (floppy drive, optical drives, etc.)

there are 26 letters in the alphbet. so you can have 24 ide drives because A and B are reserved for floppies. I think that is what you meant but it's not what you said.

 

[DerwenArtos12]

the GA-K8NSNXP and the GA-K8NS-PRO can support 4 sata and 8 pata drives, so with no opticals you could have 12 hard drives. non other that I could find would support 12. there both s754's.

 

[poppagene]

Originally posted by: DerwenArtos12
the GA-K8NSNXP and the GA-K8NS-PRO can support 4 sata and 8 pata drives, so with no opticals you could have 12 hard drives. non other that I could find would support 12. there both s754's.

The GA-8PENXP which the OP has and teh GA-8KNXP also support 4 sata and 8 pata. I have one of each. I don't have any sata drives, but I am currently running 2 opticals and 6 pata drives on both the 8penxp and the 8knxp.