Korean Job Discussion Forums

[SuperHero]

On Monday I'm putting together my new system and getting a P5KC board. looking at the stats I see:

[spliff]

Yeah, get 2TB in raid...awesome!

[jeffkim1972]

DE/SATA: 4x SATA2 Ports (By ICH9); 1x ATA-133 Channel, 1x SATA2 Port, 1x External SATA2 Port, Support RAID 0,1, JBOD (By Jmicron JMB363 PATA and SATA Controller)

Normally your HD port is inside the computer. But in this case, they are allowing you to a port that can be connected directly from the outside, just like a USB port, except it's a SATA2, normally called eSATA.

Raid isn't the number of HDs, it's the redundancy mechanism, the ports limit the number of drives.

Raid 0, alternates writing on two disk sets, no parity
Raid 1, copies data to two disk sets, but no parity

But with each SATA port, you can only have one device or HD.

On the eSATA, that port is essentially the Jmicron JMB363 PATA and SATA Controller. With an expander, you can hook up 16 HDs.

So the maximum number of drives is 23 on the ATAs:
4x SATA2 Ports (By ICH9) = 4
1x SATA2 Ports = 1
1 x ATA-133 = 2 (old IDE allows master and slave drives)
eSATA = 16

But the RAID will only work with the drives hooked up with the controller, or 16 of them.

Because of USB, you can essentially have 127 devices per host.

With the IEEE1394 port you can have 63 drives.

your mouse and keyboard probably take up 2 so if you really want to nerd out, you can hook up 125+23+63=211 hard drives.

If you are curious why they list

4x SATA2 Ports (By ICH9)
and then
1x SATA2 Ports

Its because the ICH9, Intel's chipset for the processor you're getting has no support for ATA, so ASUS added their own chip to allow ATA-133 drives and an extra SATA2 port.

I used to work for Dell about 10 years ago, but i haven't been keeping up at all.

[hanguker]

Wow! Reps to Jeffkim! Nice answer.

[SuperHero]

[jeffkim1972]

Thanks!

Since you are building your own, you get to choose your own case and power supply. So it is up to you, how big of a case with internal bays it has. The more drives you add, you probably have to add a larger power supply as well.

But all the external HDs you hook up will probably require their own power supply, so you'll need a ton of outlets or cables. So in the case you want to run your own servers and need a ton of storage you just get one of these and upgrade as you add more and more drives.

http://www.netapp.com/products/storage-systems/enterprise-storage/fas2000.html

Once you reach your limit of maximum drives by port, you can actually move onto networked drives, over a local area network and there, you have no limits at all.

Here is a good overview of disk arrays.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disk_array