Ran out of SATA ports on my repurposed PC...

[brisimmons105]

I've been using a repurposed Dell XPS PC as my unRAID server for the past few years and it's been great. However, I'm now to the point where I'm running out of storage and I need to add some more drives.

 

The dell has 4 SATA ports on the motherboard and they're all are used up.  I also have run out of power cables for the power supply.

 

Without buying a whole new case, whats the most ideal solution?  Would buying a PCI card and adding more SATA ports be the best idea? What about power?

 

I'm not opposed to buying an external hard drive enclosure, but I know that SATA is much faster and would prefer that if possible...unless it really doesn't matter that much.

 

What's the preferred method of upgrading to more storage?

[wreck]

How many ports are you wanting to add? What mobo do you have?

[brisimmons105]

I guess 4 additional SATA ports would be fine for the foreseeable future.

 

I'm not entirely sure about the motherboard. It's a The model is Dell XPS 8500.

[brisimmons105]

I guess what I'm asking is which would be better:

 

1) Purchase a PCI SATA Card and a Power supply and continue putting drives in my current case.

2) Purchase an external 4 bay enclosure and connect it somehow to my current mobo (maybe use one of the currently used SATA ports and move the current HDD into the bay?).

 

[tdallen]

The preferred approach is to buy a PCIex sata controller rather than PCI.  The Dell website isn't cooperating right now so I can't see if you have available PCIex slots, but take a look at your manual.  Examples include Syba, Supermicro, IBM, and Dell.  You should be able to buy inexpensive Molex to SATA power splitter cables to power the new drives.  I assume your case has room for more drives, but again since the website isn't cooperating take a look at your manual.

[brisimmons105]

Thanks a lot tdallen, that helps.

 

I do have PCIex slots.  I have 3 PCI-express x1 slots and 1 PCI-express x16 slot, and I do have room for more hard drives in my case.

 

I don't have any more power cables available, so you are saying take the splitter and split from one already in use and power the other one, correct?

Should I be concerned about overloading the power supply?

[tdallen]

A PCIex x1 slot can easily support 2 drives, and 4 would be Ok but it might slow down during parity checks.  A PCIex x16 slot can easily support 8 or more drives.  You can pick up a Dell PERC H310 or 200 on eBay for pretty cheap, it's a good way to add SATA ports to your machine.  The Dell PERC cards are x8 cards that fit in x16 slots that can handle 8 drives and are typically pulled from servers and resold as parts.

 

You are correct about how to use a splitter.  You should be careful with the power supply, but it may be fine depending on what you have going on in the XPS.  Typical power supplies are dual rail and split the available power to the different supply lines coming out of it.  That makes sense when you power a high end graphics card with one half of your capacity and a couple of hard drives with the other half.  For unRAID we usually recommend single rail power supplies - all power available on all supply lines.  That way it doesn't matter where you plug in the hard drives.

 

Depending on what type of power supply you have, how many drives you add, and which supply lines you add them to you could get into trouble.  Hard drives don't draw a lot of power most of the time but they add up and your system needs to be able to survive the surge in demand during power up and parity checks.  My old desktop 400w dual rail power supply was giving me some trouble when I went to 6 drives, where a 400w single rail would have been fine.  You'll have to keep track of things and update the power supply if things get hairy.  If you have the model number of your current power supply you should be able to determine the capacity and research whether it is single or dual rail.

[kizer]

Also along with Dual Rail you have to consider how old is your power supply when adding several new drives and a controller card. As things get older things tend to get a bit unpredictable and not as reliable. You may be perfectly fine, but just things to consider and food for thought on Future Proofing your build and your data.

[brisimmons105]

Thanks for all the help guys.  Still basically a noob at all this stuff.

 

I couldn't find any rail specs on my power supply, other than the wattage (460w) and model number, but I think it actually might be a triple rail based on the photo (attached).

 

Also, in regards to the PCIex controller - I'm not sure as to wether I need a RAID controller or not - would something like this work?

http://www.amazon.com/IO-Crest-Controller-Non-Raid-SI-PEX40064/dp/B00AZ9T3OU/

 

Assuming the above will work, the best scenario would probably be to:

1) Get a new single rail power supply that can power all of my devices

2) Get a new PCIex SATA controller

3) Just plug the new HDDs into the new controller, leave the other HDDs where they are and voila!?