Hi again, I was wondering if there was a type of device that works for the sata ports in the same fashion an extension cord works for a electric outlet. Meaning a device that can increase the amount of available connections. connections.
' Wrote:Hi again, I was wondering if there was a type of device that works for the sata ports in the same fashion an extension cord works for a electric outlet. Meaning a device that can increase the amount of available connections. connections.
The chances are fairly good that no such animal exits.
That doesn't mean that it doesn't exist, just that I haven't seen it.
Why you would need such an item boggles the mind though, most motherboards that have SATA ports have at least 4 of them and four should be more than enough.
No, but you should be able to pickup either a PCI or PCIe disk controller with extra SATA ports. Even better, get one that can do RAID arrays, but only the hardware kind. Stay away from anything Nvraid.
' Wrote:No, but you should be able to pickup either a PCI or PCIe disk controller with extra SATA ports. Even better, get one that can do RAID arrays, but only the hardware kind. Stay away from anything Nvraid.
As long as you get a decent controller, no. Even cheap ones there probably wont be a setback other than features and durability most likely. Also, as Ryeguy said, get a RAID controller, if you dont have RAID, you want it. It's quite nice not having to worry about a hard drive failure causing memory loss and the performance boost is awesome.
SATA is a serial connection - one device per connector. A splitter connector like you have with a power outlet won't work. The solution has already been provided - a PCI or PCIE SATA controller is what you need. They can be cheap - just check at a computer store what they have available. More then $30 it doesn't need to cost and it should give you at least four, usually eight or more outlets to work with.
There should be no setback over native SATA - those are just hooked to the PCI bus internally (via their controller) anyway. Only minor disadvantage might be that you can't boot from them.
And at above's RAID comment: If a person is skimping on as little as a drive controller, I doubt said person would buy redundant harddrives. RAID is only useful if you want to increase performance (by striping, greater risk to data since one physical drive down means more logical ones down) or mirroring as you propose (cloning the contents of one drive to a second drive - halves capacity but drive failure means no data loss).
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Actually there is lesser known feature implemented by certain SATA controller chipsets called "port multiplier", most often for mbs/controllers with eSATA ports. Allows to connect several SATA devices to single port. It's mostly used for DAS (Direct Attached Storage, as opposed to NAS - Network Attached Storage) external hard drive enclosures. I know Silicon Image and Marvell SATA controllers got that, but either way you should first find out manufacturer and model to see if your implements that feature.
Keep in mind this ain't sort of generic USB hubs, it's somewhat more complicated in use and is rather specific: it's used for storage systems.