Where can I go for some basic education on building 101? My current question is what purpose do SATA controller cards serve when the mother board has SATA ports on it? Is this a way to add more SATA ports or is it required regardless of use of MB SATA ports? I know this is well below the level of most questions here and I am grateful for any responses either directing me to good reading materials for novice builders or for answers to this specific question.

 

Thanks.

Many mobos have only few sata ports. And many times the drives get filled pretty fast once you get it goin'

The vast majority of the time it is just to get more ports.

 

Sometimes, the ports on the mobo are not as efficient with combined bandwidth during parity checks as a PCIe card could be (particularly when using a lot of the mobo SATA ports) so some people will use a PCIe SATA card to squeeze out a little better performance on certain motherboards.

The number of ports = the number of possible drives to connect.

 

With 4 motherboard ports, using 2TB drives, you could have a max of a 6TB protected array (1 parity + 3 data)

 

With 4 motherboard ports + 1 8 port addon controller (12 total ports), using 2TB drives, you could have a max of a 22TB protected array (1 parity + 11 data)

 

So adding an 8 port SATA card to a 4 SATA port motherboard almost quadruples your possible capacity.

Thank you all for taking the time to help me. Here is what I ordered today (as before I'm grateful to anyone pointing out missing items or providing any other feedback/input):

 

1ea Coolermaster Centurion 590 case (per the RB-1200 spec)

2ea Icy Dock MB454SPF-B Backplane module

1ea Cooler Master Silent Pro 600 PSU

1ea Supermicro MBD-C2SEA-0 LGA 775 G45 MoBo

1ea Kingston 1Gb 240 pin DDR3 memory

1ea Intel Celeron E1600 2.4 GHZ 775 65W Dual-Core Processor

2ea WD20EADS 2TB SATA drives

 

I have no clue what additional cables or parts I'll need so I'll have to likely go back for more, but this is the core componentry I chose after a couple weeks of reviewing the posts and getting no response from Lime on when they might be shipping more RB-1200s.

Thank you all for taking the time to help me. Here is what I ordered today (as before I'm grateful to anyone pointing out missing items or providing any other feedback/input):

 

1ea Coolermaster Centurion 590 case (per the RB-1200 spec)

2ea Icy Dock MB454SPF-B Backplane module

1ea Cooler Master Silent Pro 600 PSU

1ea Supermicro MBD-C2SEA-0 LGA 775 G45 MoBo

1ea Kingston 1Gb 240 pin DDR3 memory

1ea Intel Celeron E1600 2.4 GHZ 775 65W Dual-Core Processor

2ea WD20EADS 2TB SATA drives

 

I have no clue what additional cables or parts I'll need so I'll have to likely go back for more, but this is the core componentry I chose after a couple weeks of reviewing the posts and getting no response from Lime on when they might be shipping more RB-1200s.

 

I believe you will find that you have everything you need with the components that you ordered, assuming you purchased a retail boxed processor (comes with fan/heatsink and thermal grease preapplied).

 

You will need a flash drive, but I assume you have one of those laying around.  Your motherboard will come with at least 2 (probably 4) SATA cables, but you only need two to connect your two drives.  

 

Those backplanes will probably not come with any SATA cables and most people will preconnect all of the ports on their bays to the available SATA ports so they don't have to tear open the case again to add the cables later.  Your motherboard only has 6 ports, so you will only be able to connect one of them (and one port from the other) anyway.

Thanks GaryMaster. I hadn't thought about preconnecting all the backplanes...good point.