So... how would I do this?

[jonessoda]

How would I go about putting 6 SATA II 3.0gb/s HDDs into a single computer? Just on the motherboard? RAID card? Which one?

The purpose of all this is to have about 3 terabytes of hard drive space on a computer, so either RAID 0 or JBOD.

 

[MagnusTheBrewer]

According to your MB manuf. http://www.gigabyte-usa.com/MotherBoard...cts/Products_Spec_GA-K8N%20Pro-SLI.htm your MB only supports 4 SATA drives so, you would need to get a different board. perhaps a server board would meet your needs.

 

[PurdueRy]

Or he could get a sata controller card...which would be cheaper...

 

[esun]

Hmm, well four 750GB drives would also give 3TB. Then again, that would probably more than offset the cost of a SATA controller, so it's probably not worth it.

 

[stardrek]

Well if you are looking for a PCIe card to do it, then you could use the Areca ARC1220, but that is a $600 RAID card and you would only get the maximum throughput that a single PCIe lane (250MB/s) could give you (Although I doubt you could get anywhere near that much data from the drives and the card) But if you put off buying that second EVGA 7800GT that your rig profile says you are getting then you could get the full benefit that it would receive from all the lanes. It performed admirably, though on a PCIe 8x lane on this review.

I doubt you want to shill out $600 for a card, so my next suggestion would be a motherboard that supports 6 SATA 3.0 Gb/s drives. Asus just came out with one this month called the ASUS M2N32-SLI Deluxe which can you read a review for here. This can be bought for about $190 at newegg (OEM though). This would require an upgrade to AM2 though, so that might not be what you want either.

A 939 motherboard that uses the nicest of the 590 SLI chips I believe would support up to 6 SATA3.0 Gb/s drives, but I don?t know of one off hand.

 

[jonessoda]

Originally posted by: MagnusTheBrewer
According to your MB manuf. http://www.gigabyte-usa.com/MotherBoard...cts/Products_Spec_GA-K8N%20Pro-SLI.htm your MB only supports 4 SATA drives so, you would need to get a different board. perhaps a server board would meet your needs.

This would be a different build. This is sort of hypothetical, as the build with these HDDs I'm planning is about $5000 in all and I don't have a job right now (although if I get one, all my income can go to computers and stuff; I'm a college student, so my roof and food are paid for). But the mobo I'm thinking of would support it: Foxconn C51XEM2AA- 8EKRS2H, Socket AM2, 6 SATAII ports on board.

Edit: Or that Asus would work too.