kwilson81

I'm just using the server for media so happy as long as it can handle that. Don't need transcoding or anything. Don't generally need multiple videos being accessed at the same time. I had an older SATA card (can't remember the exact model) in the same config that resulted in the system being unusable any time it was doing a library scan. I think there was a huge bottleneck in the card. In the UK, yes.

Currently using a tower case with a couple of 5-in-3 cages. Pretty cramped now though. Plan is to update to a 4u or similar case (something like this) if I can support more drives.

Awesome. I'll give it a go and see how well it works. Thanks for the info - much appreciated.

Sorry, I meant that I thought I was wrong in thinking I could swap them out and it would work in a usable way. I'd been reading about issues with available bandwidth and thought that maybe just swapping the cards and attaching a bunch of disks would leave me with something too slow to be useful. Very happy if I'm wrong about that though.

After a couple of days of trawling through many, many posts, I thought adding to this one would make sense since it's a very similar question. I'm looking to update an older system to support ~24 drives. I currently have this mobo (http://www.asrock.com/mb/AMD/880GM-LE FX/#osW732) with a SUPERMICRO AOC-SAS2LP-MV8 card to give (what seems like slow) access to 8 drives (+6 onboard for 14 in total). I had been looking at the LSI00244 9201-16i card thinking I could just swap out one for the other to allow 22 drives (6 onboard, 16 on the card) but, from what I've been reading, this seems wrong. Am I right in thinking I'll need a new mobo with PCIe 3, and a SAS expander card (one of the ones mentioned above) as well as something like the LSI card before I'm going to get anywhere? Still trying to get my head around a lot of the terms and tech so apologies if this is a daft question.