Too Many HDD not enough SATAs on MB

Got my build up and running:

ASUS P8Z77-V LX
Intel i7 3770 3.4
32GB Vengence
OCZ 120GB SSD
GeForce GTX 660 Ti 3GB PCIe 3.0 x16
Win 7 64-bit
Cosmos II Case

I was given about 6 computers that were no longer working for various reasons and included in those were about 15 HDDs ranging from 320GB to 2TB. Most of them work, and I want to put as many as possible in my Cosmos case as it has a total of 13 bays.

Problem is my board only had 6 total SATA connectors on the board. I have looked at some PCI cards online, but they have about two to three ports on them.

On one of the servers that is replacing some of these towers I was given the mobo has a mini SAS connection to 4x SATA drives. Tried to find something like this online as well.

Any help would be appreciated.

If you really want to put that many drives in your computer, I think an SATA card would fix your problem. I think that it is a little excess, and managing that many drives would be a PITA. Keep in mind the power and cooling that it is going to take to keep all the running properly. I think your best bet is to pick the six biggest drives and work with those for right now. Good luck with your build.

If you want to run that many drives you should probably go with a NAS or external enclosure of some type. It will be much cheaper and put less stress on your components especially with mechanical drives. Otherwise you are going to need dedicated drive fans or coolers to prevent overheating issues. Most anything external that would hold more then four drives would or should have the needed cooling built in.

http://www.amazon.com …-Enclosure/dp/B005GYDMY​Q/

Alternatively below is the card you would need which your motherboard should be able to support. It might seem like a good idea to load up those bays but it was never intended for you to run even 10 mechanical drives in that case. Most people these days add front fan controllers, water coolers, internal card readers, additional USB ports, DVD and or Blu-Ray along with a hot swap bay or two. So figure many will fill 3-5 bays just with some of the above accessories. Which is why they add so many bays to allow for better customization which is a big selling point for hardcore modders.

http://www.newegg.com …aspx?Item=N82E1​6816103220

Sacadelic wrote in post #15786392
If you really want to put that many drives in your computer, I think an SATA card would fix your problem. I think that it is a little excess, and managing that many drives would be a PITA. Keep in mind the power and cooling that it is going to take to keep all the running properly. I think your best bet is to pick the six biggest drives and work with those for right now. Good luck with your build.

True, it does seem like too much, but I'm kinda trying to use this PC for all kinds of different things, PS, LR, Premier Pro, recording security cameras, etc, I figured since the Cosmos II has the bays and I already have the drives I would just use the drives instead of putting everything together or partition the drives. The Cosmos II also has dedicated fans for the drive bays. It even has two bays that are hot swap.

isoMorphic wrote in post #15786596
If you want to run that many drives you should probably go with a NAS or external enclosure of some type. It will be much cheaper and put less stress on your components especially with mechanical drives. Otherwise you are going to need dedicated drive fans or coolers to prevent overheating issues. Most anything external that would hold more then four drives would or should have the needed cooling built in.

http://www.amazon.com …-Enclosure/dp/B005GYDMY​Q/

Alternatively below is the card you would need which your motherboard should be able to support. It might seem like a good idea to load up those bays but it was never intended for you to run even 10 mechanical drives in that case. Most people these days add front fan controllers, water coolers, internal card readers, additional USB ports, DVD and or Blu-Ray along with a hot swap bay or two. So figure many will fill 3-5 bays just with some of the above accessories. Which is why they add so many bays to allow for better customization which is a big selling point for hardcore modders.

http://www.newegg.com …aspx?Item=N82E1​6816103220

You are correct. I do have a Drobo that I've used with my MBP and more ext drives that I want to count that have accumulated over the last few years. I was hoping that with all the room, bays and fans that I could fill it up and have everything organized in one place and still take advantage of all the hardware lying around. I plan on adding a blue-ray drive, card reader, etc, but I don't want to spend more than $50 on a PCI Sata card if I can help it.

I was hoping to be able to put all these drives in the case, transfer all my photos from all the external drives onto these drives, organize them in LR and then take advantage of the power of this PC to quickly go through and delete, rename and have everything centralized and nice and tidy.

I hope to get something like this all set up to not only be organized, but to have the satifaction of knowing that when I sit down and need to find an image, it will be in this computer and I won't have to go through all the external drives I have to find which one it is on.

You wont find an 8 port card for $50 and there is no solution i'm aware of for that cheap. Even scrapping USB3 connectors from external enclosures would be $20-30/per x8 enclosures. Which would still be $150-250 just for a ghetto rig. You could go the USB route but you wont get the same performance of a proper card. And there are slightly cheaper 8 port cards ($300 range) but there is a reason they are cheaper.

isoMorphic wrote in post #15787062
You wont find an 8 port card for $50 and there is no solution i'm aware of for that cheap. Even scrapping USB3 connectors from external enclosures would be $20-30/per x8 enclosures. Which would still be $150-250 just for a ghetto rig. You could go the USB route but you wont get the same performance of a proper card. And there are slightly cheaper 8 port cards ($300 range) but there is a reason they are cheaper.

Sorry, didn't see that the card supported 8 ports. No, I would go much higher than $50 for 8 ports, but I can't go up to $550. If I could, I would love to get that card. I will add it to my favorites just in case.

Thanks for bringing that to my attention.

www.freenas.org

How many of these are closer to 2TB and how many are closer to 320GB? The smaller drives, in addition to being, well, small, are also slower. I don't see the point in trying to manage so many drives and add-on cards when you can get a 2TB drive for < $100 and they have 3 and 4TB drives readily available.

Wipe the data, sell them on ebay and buy a 2-3 large new drives. They will be faster and easier to handle.

tkbslc wrote in post #15787515
How many of these are closer to 2TB and how many are closer to 320GB? The smaller drives, in addition to being, well, small, are also slower. I don't see the point in trying to manage so many drives and add-on cards when you can get a 2TB drive for < $100 and they have 3 and 4TB drives readily available.

Wipe the data, sell them on ebay and buy a 2-3 large new drives. They will be faster and easier to handle.

Most are 1TB, the smaller ones are the drives that crashed due to running 24/7. I figured that I would just use these for now and then upgrade to the 3-4TB drives later on if I needed to.

I have a total of 5 drives hooked up now and the DVD drive is taking up the 6th SATA.

One thing that puzzles me is, I set up the SSD and one HDD (2TB) when the mobo was in another case. I didn't notice it until I moved everything to the Cosmos II, but I realized that the 2TB drive did not show in my list of HDDs. When I removed the drive, I could not boot. I would get a bootmgr missing error. As soon as I plugged in the 2TB drive, it would boot fine, but still nothing listed under HDDs. I can see the drive in my BIOS.

When I bought the SSD I bought Win 7 Pro SP1 OEM and loaded it on the SSD. Everything seem to go smoothly so did something go wrong during OS install?

Give this a read and you should be able to get it sorted out in no time.

http://www.terabyteunl​imited.com/kb/article.​php?id=324

Old hard drives tend to be slower than new. Given what new ones cost I think this exercise is a little pointless, especially given what interface cards will cost.

If you are still in love with your old HDD, then you should get an external HDD docking station instead.
Good luck.

...got a PSU powerful enough to cover those drives?

I'd do what others have suggested. Sell them and consolidate the sold disk space into larger individual units.

Consider the consequences of a major power issue that blows your entire machine... all those drives potentially fried at once. Don't see the need for more than 4 physical drives in a case and the rest in either NAS, hot swappable caddies or even external Sata.

Try UnRAID. Add as many HDDs as you want but you'll need another case. Sounds like you have some of the old hardware that can be reused. You'll need a new PSU that can handle so many HDDs - single rail +12V and preferably over 40A for many HDDs.

I have just setup one of these with the free version that lets me use 3 HDD. Pro version lets you have 21 HDD

http://lime-technology.com/