8-10 SATA lanes on an Intel ICH soon?

[BTRY B 529th FA BN]

Without adding on any cards, it seems the limit of Intel ICH SATA ports on motherboards today is 6. What is limiting this?

I do have a 10 port SATA board, but the other controller is a SIL 5723. I am in it for hot-swap ability and using 1 SATA port for the main OS/boot drive leaves the option of only 4 SATA ports to do hotswap in a RAID-1 and I don't want the added time in the boot with add-on cards.. :hmm:

 

[Mark R]

The intel ICH chip only has 6 SATA ports on it. If you want more ports, you need a seperate controller.

 

[VirtualLarry]

X68 is going to have 8 SATA3/SAS ports, and 6 AHCI SATA ports.

 

[BTRY B 529th FA BN]

AHCI expansion is the thing I'm looking for 🙁

 

[vailr]

I heard positive opinions about Areca raid cards. Expensive solution, however.
Used with SSD's, should probably avoid any potential slow boot times.

 

[vailr]

http://www.fudzilla.com/content/view/18471/1/

Sandy Bridge in 2011 compatible

Sandy Bridge, the brand new 32nm architecture is coming in Q1 2011 and so is the chipset to support it. There will be at least five different chipsets for these new dual and quad CPUs and let me present you a few of them.

The Q67 is the first on the list and it presents the Business stable generation of products. It supports LGA 1155 CPUs, has 14 USB 2.0. it has total of six SATA ports where two of them are 6Gb/sec while the others are slower.

It features support for PCIe 8X, it also comes with PCI support and it can run two integrated displays. The Q67 doesn’t support the feature called performance tuning but some of the six series chipsets will but the board does support PAVP content protection as well as Intel RST 10.
The Q65 looks very similar but it has only one SATA 6Gb/sec out of six, and its Intel RST 10 is AHCI HW / SW compliant.

Both of them are aiming for business CPUs and platforms that are expected in Q1 2011.