October 13, 201411 yr take a look at this artical! http://www.geek.com/chips/new-asrock-motherboard-has-18-sata-ports-so-you-can-become-a-storage-god-1606552/ Quote-Geek.com Building your own rig nowadays isn’t exactly difficult — regardless of the your oddly specific requirements. Thanks to outlets like NewEgg, TigerDirect, Amazon, and especially PCPartPicker, it has never been easier to find, compare, and purchase components. Sometimes, though, the available components just don’t meet your wildly specific hardware needs. If one of your wildly specific requirements consisted of a veritable ocean of SATA ports, though, you no longer need to look any further. ASRock has announced that the X99 Extreme 11 motherboard contains 18 SATA ports, which means you can now live out your lifelong fantasy of owning a standard desktop that somehow manages to stash 18 individual storage drives under its hood. Of the 18 SATA ports, 10 are SATA 3 6Gb/s, while the remaining eight are SAS-3 12GB/s. If those 18 storage devices sound okay, but 20 is really what gets you salivating, ASRock has also included two M.2 SSD slots, for when the previous 18 standard SSDs just aren’t enough. To go along with your new army of storage devices, the motherboard also features four-way SLI or CrossFireX, five PCIe Gen3 x16 slots, and fits into the LGA 2011-3 socket form factor. It also has Gigabit LAN with Teaming support, eight DDR4 RAM slots with a max capacity up to 128GB, 7.1 HD audio, and four USB 3.0 ports and four USB 2.0 ports. ASRock has yet to announce a price, but we can only assume this will be on the higher end of motherboard prices — not to mention the cost of actually getting use out of all of those SATA ports.
October 13, 201411 yr NICE board !! Supports Registered RAM, so absolutely no bus loading issues with 128GB of RAM, and the outstanding Haswell Xeons. Now all I need is to convince myself it's okay to pay $2800 for a CPU chip :) (14-core E5-2697 ... with a 21579 score on Passmark !!) The PCIe x4 M.2 slots are also amazing. Not aware of any M.2 devices that can support that (yet) ... but I'm sure they're coming. Note that most current M.2 SSDs still use SATA-3 interfaces, so they're not even taking advantage of the current x2 M.2 slots (but there are a few SSDs with the PCIe interface - if you're buying an M.2 pay close attention to this if you want to really benefit from the slot).
November 6, 201411 yr I'm seriously considering using this board with the new 18 core e5 and replacing my 2 gaming machines, my xbmc computer and both of my UnRaid boxes. Unfortunately I don't know jack about VMs but having it would give me plenty of incentive to learn.
November 6, 201411 yr That would indeed be an amazing setup -- I'd think the "mere" 14-core version is plenty ... but 18 would give you even more headroom. The nice thing about the Xeon e5's is they support registered RAM, so there's effectively no limit on how much memory you can install [bus loading issues are a non-issue with buffered RAM]. As long as the motherboard you select has enough slots for the graphics cards you'd need for the gaming VM's (and the AsRock does, with support for 4 PCIe x16 cards !!), you could indeed run 2 gaming system, a couple of UnRAID VMs, and even more with that board !!
November 6, 201411 yr Good point about the cpu. I like the extra head room with the extra cores. I don't run crossfire or SLI so I'm good with just two graphics cards for the gaming VMs. One small card for the media center. One external hba for my das case and maybe if I can fit it a pcie sound card.
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