Hey there I’m starting to work with some pretty big 4k video files these days and it’s required me to pickup some 4tb hard drives, thing is my mother board only has 4 Sata ports in it and I’ve got 6 drives I want to connect so I’m wondering whats the process of expanding Sata ports?
Bare in mind I’m might want to do some sort of raid drive system for redundancy but only if it’s easy.
I’ve seen some PCIE cards floating around with stata stuff but I’m sure whats up with them. Otherwise I’m looking at buying a new motherboard I guess.
For expanding connectivity for a machine already present, there are basically two ways to go
PCIe sata expansion cards. Historically these have been dodgy and recommended against. I couldn’t tell you how they fare currently.
PCIe sas expansion cards, in HBA (host bud adapter, basically passes through the device directly) mode, not RAID mode. Old LSI 92XX SAS2 series cards can be found cheap on eBay. These should have a little fan put on them. These can have sata drives connected directly with a proper adapter cable.
If getting a NAS, it’s a very good idea to look into 2.5G-10G network connectivity options. An HDD (~180-220MB/s) can actually saturate a 1G network line (max 125MB/s) when doing sequential large file transfers.
Redundancy is good, but I advise against hardware or dumb software RAID. If you have data that matters, you need to have a checksumming filesystem so you can detect and (with redundancy) correct errors. Surviving a disk failure or having backups doesn’t matter if your sata card goes bad or your HBA overheats and starts occasionally writing garbage at some unknown point in an unknown amount of files.
Your most common options are ZFS or BTRFS (mirrors only). SnapRaid is also a flexible option and the most viable for use with windows, it even has a gui available. BcacheFS is interesting for the future, but experimental and not in kernel and requires compiling.
All of these require sitting down and understanding how they work and what you need to do to make sure what you expect to happen, actually happens.
Generally, getting a pair of the largest possible disks that fits within your $/TB budget will work best for you. Small drives have a cost in space sand connectivity limitations.
I believe you may be looking in your problem with a single workstation mindset, you actually have the option to get a NAS for better future proofing and potential expandability - no need to mess up with your current workstation setup.
The only potential downside is the time to transfer your files. Do you intend to edit directly from the NAS, if ever? You may need a 2.5 or maybe 10Gbit LAN if you want a good performance. If it is for achiving purposes, the standard 1Gbit may be enough, depending on the size of your files and the potential waiting time yoi may waste completing the transfer.
If it is work related, dont shy away from spending, especially if you have access to company funds to improve your workflow.
I assume you have capacity in your case for 6 more hard drives.
The fastest way to access the drives is if they are fitted in your computer rather than in a NAS as @regulareel is suggesting.
You can buy a SAS RAID card on ebay pretty cheap with cables. The card will connect up to 8 SATA drives not just SAS drives. Get the SATA cables if you have SATA drives obviously.
People are saying don’t get RAID style get HBA style. Get whatever you can get but make sure if it’s RAID that you can find the Windows drivers.
You won’t be booting from these, keep your existing boot drive. You have a choice of RAID settings depending if you want more speed or more data safety.
Yeah, don’t get SATA cards, no one knows if they actually work OK.
An easiest solution is to get a new motherboard with an abundance of SATA ports. More expensive. You may want to get a bigger case too.
By far the easiest solution…
…is to buy the biggest f-off hard drive you can find. Even if this is £400 it might not be much more than where you’re already heading. However you should by a 2nd for backups.
At the risk of parroting the others, pcie card is the way to go. I got a 1x to 4 sata ports card for like $20 on ebay, which is awesome. The reason I’m inspired to reply despite having the same answer as the others, though, is to make sure your power supply is fit for the task. I didn’t realize having 8 drives connected to my old PSU might be an issue with power delivery and I spent ages trying to troubleshoot random drive issues, noises, and corruption from resets mid file transfer. I highly recommend you don’t overlook the power draw on mechanical drives if you start installing a bunch of them on a budget like me For reference I was having these issues on a Ryzen 2400G with a 400W PSU with a GTX1650. By the numbers I should’ve had a ton of headroom given the CPU was only like 60W and the GPU was 75W max, but cheap PSU’s I don’t think live up to their rated wattages these days.
Since upgrading to 750W I’ve got more drives, a 30 series GPU, and an R7 CPU now and I haven’t had a single random reset or file corruption since. Hope that helps a bit.
I disagree with the others on the ‘get bigger drives’ thing though. Depending on what you’re doing with your PC there are a ton of benefits to having many smaller drives than fewer larger ones imho. 500gb - 1tb ssds are cheap and awesome if you have room for a bunch of them.
A large capacity drive is just easier. Multiple smaller drives can be better but are more effort.
It’s not so much the power capacity of your PSU but having sufficient quality connections for your drives. Splitters driving splitters is not a good idea as i have discovered. It was on ZFS so it sorted itself out when I got better cabling. Good learning experience.
Definitely easier to just have larger drives lol. I like the idea of separating my projects to many drives. Buying a new pc for just my music production means just moving one drive to another system, a dd backup image is specific to a device, guaranteed they won’t all fail at the same time, different boot OS for each project but accessible by all the others (preserving backup bootloader partitions ).
I find there’s a bunch of little benefits to having more smaller drives than fewer larger ones, and those benefits stack up in addition to the better price overall. For eg, hacking and playing with malicious code or CTF’s even in a VM I’d much prefer that being done on their own physical drives just to be safe; or storing a crypto blockchain that’s constantly writing to the drive I’d much rather that drive fail on its own without anything important being at risk. My music collection took forever to rip from CD’s so if all I’m doing is reading from that specific “music” SSD then it’ll basically last forever so I’m protecting a whole device by having heavy write workloads isolated over here and preserving drives with mainly read workloads somewhere else. It’s an efficient system, imho.
Also, concurrently scanning across all drives at the same time is a huge bonus, like running anti-virus while running an image back up while also doing video editing scrubbing from large files on a third drive. It really makes a huge difference in how much downtime I have to sacrifice when multitasking long tasks.
Did you already max out, the mainbaords SATA ports? Or they disabled by other peripheral? [ex. m.2 usage]
HBAs can be had, strapped either with one (1) or two (2) bulk headers [x4 or x8 pcie req.]
Breakout cable(s) should be included, allowing support of four (4) respective drives
There’s exactly one consumer SATA card I’d recommend. Silverstone EC06. Specifies the exact chip and it’s ASMedia. Although six, not eight port like the HBAs other are suggesting. Doesn’t require a fan though.
But yeah, like other have been saying, your best bet is a NAS with 10 Gbps. I highly suggest building your own hardware, maybe buying a refurbished server, and installing TrueNAS on it. A turnkey ZFS solution, giving both redundancy and regular scrubs to protect against bitrot (those are zfs features, not TrueNAS, it just makes it easier).
).