Hey,

 

with 24 drive arrays now becoming reality with 5.0 RC8, what would be the ideal motherboard/controller card combination to run all the drives at SATA-600?

 

There are some boards with the Intel Z77 chipset that have six SATA-600 ports (two provided by the chipset, four provided by an add-on chip) and I found one, (for AMD processors with an AMD chipset) the MSI FM2-A85XA-G65 that supposedly has eight SATA-600 ports.

 

There are SAS/SATA cards with the capability to adress up to eight drives at SATA-600 speed, such as the AOC-SAS2LP-MV8, which has a PCIe 8x interface (so with eigh native ports, I'd need two of these and preferqably put them in 16/8x slots which most modern boards have). If the board has less than eight full-speed SATA-600 ports though, I'd have to go for another PCIe 4x card I think?

 

I also found one, the HighPoint Rocket EJ6172 that has six SFF-8087 ports for up to 24 SAS/SATA drives at SATA-600, but it seems to be more of an expansion card that needs another controller card (or am I just to stupid to understand what it does). It would be a steal at around $580.

 

Any other ideas/suggestions on how to run 24 drives at SATA-600?

So you are going to be running 24 SSDs?  If not then Sata-300 is more then enough for a spinner.  Spinners can barely saturate Sata-150.  Older drives (think when 250GB was big) not even that.  If you use a SAS expander you can use the extra speed that SATA-600 provides.

So you are going to be running 24 SSDs?  If not then Sata-300 is more then enough for a spinner.  Spinners can barely saturate Sata-150.  Older drives (think when 250GB was big) not even that.  If you use a SAS expander you can use the extra speed that SATA-600 provides.

 

+1

The limit is the drive. Not the bus speed.

 

no mechanical hard drives that run at 600mb/s let alone 300 mb/s. only about 4 run above 150 mb/s..

 

If you're building an ssd array. I'd go hardware raid or at least zfs...

 

Edit.

To build a 24x600 build is possible. Use several m1015's. but it won't be cost effective. You would be paying for a feature you might not benefit from for years if ever. Unless its all ssd.  And yes in a few years, an all ssd consumer ssd sever might be common. Once the multi tb SSDs are priced at a cheap price point.