** OFFICIAL ** Intel DX38BT & DX48BT2 BoneTrail Thread

[dukzcry]

Sean-E-Boy:

as far as the board, needs more internal SATA ports

But i don't need a lot of them :-)
I'm using cheapest middle level controller that you ever could fine (Dell PERC 5). Those are actually rebranded LSI and similar to LSI 8408E and 8480E. You'll get best HW solution for home. /This is not cheap LSI Fusion-MPT, but real LSI MegaRAID SAS. With rechangeable RAM and cache battery. Not such crap as Promise or ST-Lab which are software RAIDs, and not like Adaptec, which may be or actually soft-raid or with closed documentation, and finally not as 3ware which are expensive but with closed documentation again. If you really need good hardware RAID, only LSI (not all of corse, and their rebrands from Intel and Dell) and Areca are good enough./
I'm using one for hardware mirroring. They are supported well by most of modern *nix systems too.

But I DON'T RECOMMEND it to anyone for this reason:
PERC 5 described as using PCI-E 8x, while actually doesn't need more than 4x slot, as this board is actually using two PCI-E to PCI-X bridges each for handling four devices. So this board capable of handling eight SAS or SATA devices. But you'll get memory conflict for second PCI-E to PCI-X bridge, so on the Intel DX48BT2 board YOU'll NOT GET second port working, so you will be able to connect only four devices, this may be problem, but for me this is more than enough, so it's ok.

But it's rather better try to buy Dell PERC 6 for low price, as these are real native PCI-E controllers, but you'll be need provide 8x slot (so you'll loose your 16x on DX48BT/BT2). With this you'll able to handle eight devices with high perfomance.

Manel:

SLI support.

You'll better bid on Skulltrail board on EBay. It's actually a MP board, but just few needs more than four cores nowdays, you'll can be able to put two Core 2 Duo's or trying using it with single Core 2 ... .
This only one from Intel that will provide you with Quad SLI :-) It's had onboard issues codes LED indicator and all bells and whistles.
Or dealing with X85...