Any Z97 boards with 10 sata ports and PCI slot?

[you2]

I think I should upgrade my sandybridge MB; and right now I'm leaning towards the asrock extreme 6 (z87) as it has 10 sata ports/PCI slot; but thought I would check if any Z97 boards are similar (asrock dropped the PCI slot in their z97 boards). A check on newegg was negative (also seems a lot of MB dropped sata port for m.sata).
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My basic configuration is 6 drives (4+2 software raid); 2 optical drives and boot drive (current 320GB hard disk). I currently have a asrock extreme4 with 2500k that is 3 years old. Might wait another year but the extra sata ports would be useful. Sadly I have one PCI card and a recent check doesn't show PCIe device I could use as a replacement so I think I woudl prefer the MB to have a PCI slot.

 

[DesiPower]

The six drives on raid, what do you use them for? if performance is not a major issue then you can go for add-on card and go for any mobo...

I think software raid could work with drives across different sata controllers...

 

[you2]

Software raid can in fact work across sata controllers (or mix eide/scsi/sata/usb for that matter) but I haven't seen any decent add-in cards (at least when I browse newegg most of them were either 2/3* or horribly expensive raid controllers.

 

[DesiPower]

Well of course the performance will be nowhere near the on board sata and that's why I asked how important is the performance to you. I have a generic 20 dollar card that I bought from newegg, have been using it for about a year now and reliability wise there are no issues, speed is slow, I get about 70 mbps for large file transfers, but it does not bother me as I use it for storage only.

 

[Insert_Nickname]

Software raid can in fact work across sata controllers (or mix eide/scsi/sata/usb for that matter) but I haven't seen any decent add-in cards (at least when I browse newegg most of them were either 2/3* or horribly expensive raid controllers.

You could use something like this. Its not crazily expensive for a 4 port SATA3 card. It even supports 7 drives with port multiplier. It does require a free PCIe x2/x4/x8 slot though, but has the advantage of working with cheap boards, so its not necessarily more expensive then a high-end board.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...-365-_-Product

For top performance, you can possibly plug it in the PCIe slots driven directly by the CPU, bypassing the DMI link to the southbridge. The catch is that not all boards support anything other then graphics cards in those slots...

Well of course the performance will be nowhere near the on board sata and that's why I asked how important is the performance to you. I have a generic 20 dollar card that I bought from newegg, have been using it for about a year now and reliability wise there are no issues, speed is slow, I get about 70 mbps for large file transfers, but it does not bother me as I use it for storage only.

If you only use it with HDDs, they'll bottleneck long before the controller...

 

[dac7nco]

This has been pretty great for me building software RAID-10s:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16816124070

I've built a few low-end Haswell workstations with this card, as I have NEVER had any luck using an additional controller with a motherboard's added controllers. This plus Intel's and you're off to the races..... it's even x2 so it doesn't bog down. Don't fool yourself, though... Z87/97 will kill it if you're striping SSDs.

Daimon

 

[you2]

I'm not really worried too much about performance; but the card are $90; So I'm not sure it is worth it when I can just buy the extreme6 z87 for $140. Guess I can think about it for a little.
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Also a couple of the reviews sound like some folks had problems with the card/linux.

 

[you2]

It occurred to me that I could plug the opticals into the add-on card; and I only need 8 sata for disks. So any suggestion for a very cheap but reliable sata pcie card with 2 ports that work with linux ?