SATA Feedback

[saaya]

And the next one
How many SATA Ports do you use, and how many do you want on a board.
Please try to think realistically, sure, 12 ports would be nice to have, but would you really use them all?

READ FIRST! This is a multiple choice Poll!
Please select one option of the "Im using X ports" and one of the "X ports are enough for me" lines and then click on VOTE NOW.

thanks for the feedback!

[INFRNL]

I am sure some here would use 12 ports. especially in a NAS. However with HDD's getting bigger and bigger; I dont think 10-12 are necessary; at least for my use. I would like all the sata drives to be run on one excellent controller though. I think 8-10 would be realistic. as I use sata optical drives as well, but I can currently manage with the 6

[SoulsCollective]

If I was to have all my devices attached to onboard SATA ports I'd be using 10 - six WD6400AAKS drives, two set aside for Velociraptor RAID when funds emerge, two for optical drives. However, I'm currently only using the one SATA port due to the HDDs etc being plugged into the RAID controller.

Realistically I think you could get away with six. Anyone using more devices is generally heavily into storage, and therefore probably has an dedicated controller or at least is willing to shell out for an expansion card.

[BenchZowner]

I'd say 10 SATA ports on the new boards.
With the SSDs becoming "mainstream" slowly or faster, the user will need more than the typical 6 SATA Ports or 8 ports soon.
You can get a killer RAID-0 array with 4 good SLC SSDs ( relatively cheap if you're wise and not following the outrageously advertised high read/write rates, and look more into IOPS & random read/writes at small blocks ) or a decent array with 6 cheaper drives.
Then you're going to need some normal HDDs for storage, and 1 or maybe 2 ports for the DVD+/-RW and/or a Blu-ray drive/recorder.

[xXlAinXx]

Well, this depends how the SSD physical limit will be treated by OS vendor in the upcoming years.
Anyway 8-10 SATA port with only one ICH10 probably it's a kinda of bandwidth kill, I believe a second controller is needed for the + 2/4 port.

[saaya]

this is a surprise to me, you guys really use that many SATA ports already and plan to use even more instead of replacing old drives with new?
hmmmm alright, ill see what i can do to make it as many ports as possible!

one thing to note though!!!
ibex peak, the 1156 chipset/southbridge, is connected to the cpu via DMI, which is based on 4 pciE 1.1 lanes...
It could be that intel upgraded it to pciE 2.0, but even then the bandwidth is rather limited... keep in mind that NICs, sound, sata, pata, esata, firewire and any pci and pciE devices all talk to the cpu through those 4 lanes! most of them dont use a lot of bandwidth so its ok, but if you use 2 NICs and move loads of data, AND run raid, AND game with a soundcard, then you will most likely feel the bottleneck for sure.
I think raid alone can already be limited notably if you use more than 2 ssds and you should be able to see this on ich10 already.

So all those P55 boards you see with a third pciE slot on the bottom... thats actually 4 lanes going to the sb, so forget about running tri sli or tri xfire on that, you dont want to even try it, trust me!

the problem with 1156 is that the sb is limited for high perf computing for sure, and you cant even use a raid pciE card cause then your stealing bw from the vga, cause there are only 16 lanes going to the cpu... so if you use a raid card, your vga will drop to 8x...

this might or might not make a big impact, but it will definately limit you... keep in mind that core i5 is pretty much a beefed up celeron platform... its not slow and bad, but its definately limited for ocing/benching and high end gaming! thats why we are going to launch FlamingBlade soon, a very nice sub 200$ X58 board with full 32 pciE lanes, and if you are really into benching and raid i definately recommend that one over 1156 boards that come out in a couple of months.

[warlove3]

LOL, best if SATA 6gb/s is implemented with 10ports........6-8ports aren't enough these days, hmm thinking of a evolution bloodrage board = with sata 6gb/s(replace the SAS ports), since SSD is going to be mainstream later on

[saaya]

well its hard to work with these results since its going to be used for different boards in different segments...
there might be an x58 refresh coming, in which case 10 ports would be nice for sure... but for a p55 board 10 ports would be a bit much, especially considering it all has to go through the sb and hence dmi interface. like SoulsCollective said, 6 is probably enough and anybody interested in more is likely to get a raid controller... but like i said, on p55 all you got is 16 lanes to the cpu, and that means raid will slow down your vga. for single vga that might actually have no to a small impact, but still... thats not what we want

so im checking if we can maybe split the lanes to 12/4 since 12 should be enough for any single vga to not see a drop in performance, and 4 is enough for almost all raid cards im just not sure if i5 will support this and if vgas actually support this...

[saxile]

This is one of the most important questions to me, I've always wanted to upgrade my dvd drives but with onboard Sata so limited I cannot. I currently use the blackops and have all 6 filled with hdd, plus the 2 esata filled with hdd, plus still could use more storage space. Only reason I haven't purchased a raid controller is cost, for one that performs worth a snot you're looking over 500 dollars, plus extra power draw, extra heat, harder to manage cables, use up more space, and hurt airflow.

[Scubar]

Im only using 3 at the moment as ive had to build a seperate pc for storage as i couldnt find enough room in any of my cases to put 8 HDDs.

[Super Nade]

Having 10 would be great!

[BenchZowner]

Welcome to last week Super Nade

Saaya is no longer working for Foxconn, and AFAIK Foxconn isn't designing & will not release any new enthusiast boards apart from 1-3 that are nearly ready.

[slim142]

I found myself that 6 are not enough anymore. I have 5 HDD slots in my case + the 2 optical drives that I have. I think 8+ are good. Less than that = Boo

[Super Nade]

Welcome to last week Super Nade

Saaya is no longer working for Foxconn, and AFAIK Foxconn isn't designing & will not release any new enthusiast boards apart from 1-3 that are nearly ready.

Man, to tell you the truth, I thought Foxconn were pulling out of the consumer MB business altogether, but then I heard otherwise. There are so many rumors flying around that I don't know what to believe and what not to believe.

Saaya had a great thing going here. Too bad that it won't materialize beyond the next few boards.

[BenchZowner]

Foxconn is and will be OEM.

Their own brand is what's at stake.
From inside info, what they decided to do is drop the enthusiast boards, and keep producing the very very low end products ( G31 S775 mobos, AM2 entry level, etc ).