Just for fun I was looking to see how many ports I could get onto a single motherboard. £200 limit per component ($350 US). No cheating (components must physically fit no X16 cards in x1 slots).

 

Without using multipliers, straight card hosted ports. Must support vga, no headless designs. 

 

My two entries:

 

Asus M2N32 WS has two PCI-X slots, two PCIe 16 slots and two PCIe x1 slots. One PCI slot.

 

I think 1 slot for PCIe x1 graphics, leaves

 

PCI-x 133 slots x2 21610SA (32 ports)

PCI slot for 21610SA adaptec cards (16 ports)

PCIe x16 slots x2  HP P800 (32 port)

PCIe X1 SYBA SY-PEX40013 (4 port)

 

94 SATA ports including the 10 onboard. 

 

SuperMicro. X7SBE

PCIe x4 for AOC-SASLP-MV8 (8 ports)

PCIe x8 for HP P800 (16 ports)

PCI-X 100 x2 (32 ports)

PCI-X 133 X2 (32 ports)

 

94 ports inc 6 onboard.

 

I havnt included USB ports which could host additional sata ports by using usb/sata bridges. If you did that little Asus could host a massive 104 sata ports! I also havnt added IDE to sata bridges either which could add another 4 ports for 108 sata ports on one motherboard. I havnt included the Lian Li 5 port x1 card (Asus 95 ports) since not seen anyone shipping it yet.

 

Anyone beat those? 

 

>> PCIe x8 for HP P800 (16 ports)

Does this work with unRAID?

 

I think we would have better luck with the Areca controllers.

With PCI X8 you can get 16 ports.

Tom mentioned in a thread that he was working with someone to build up to 24 ports and add in the areca driver.