To many drives not enough SATA ports.

[Ophidio]

I have come into a slight abundance of HDD somehow... I was cleaning my room and I found two 1TB Drives just chillin... I've plugged them in through the external SATA connector on my case and they both work and I've formatted both of them so I could use them for storage. This will give me a total of four 1TB HDD and my 240GB SSD, only problem is my motherboard has four 6gb/s SATA ports and 2 3gb/s Sata ports. I also have a optical drive for the games I do own on a disk. Does anyone have a solution to help me fix this? I know I could just plug the Optical Drive into one of the 3gb/s ports but what about the other HDD I have that won't have a port to go into unless I just use the other 3gb/s port which I don't really want to do for a HDD. Oh, and I just remember my external HDD connectors are plugged into the other 3gb/s port so that's every port taken. Do I need to buy a RAID Controller to solve this issue?

 

Thank you for all of the help. Also, If I do need a RAID Controller can someone recommend a good one?

[You_are_a_cunt]

One of these would sort your problems

http://www.amazon.com/StarTech-com-Express-Controller-HyperDuo-Tiering/dp/B00BUC3N74

[Josephdalepi]

I have come into a slight abundance of HDD somehow... I was cleaning my room and I found two 1TB Drives just chillin... I've plugged them in through the external SATA connector on my case and they both work and I've formatted both of them so I could use them for storage. This will give me a total of four 1TB HDD and my 240GB SSD, only problem is my motherboard has four 6gb/s SATA ports and 2 3gb/s Sata ports. I also have a optical drive for the games I do own on a disk. Does anyone have a solution to help me fix this? I know I could just plug the Optical Drive into one of the 3gb/s ports but what about the other HDD I have that won't have a port to go into unless I just use the other 3gb/s port which I don't really want to do for a HDD. Oh, and I just remember my external HDD connectors are plugged into the other 3gb/s port so that's every port taken. Do I need to buy a RAID Controller to solve this issue?

 

Thank you for all of the help. Also, If I do need a RAID Controller can someone recommend a good one?

everything you have but the ssd is a 3gb/s device

3 gb/s devices are forwards compatible with 6 gb/s ports

there are no problems here

[Ophidio]

everything you have but the ssd is a 3gb/s device

3 gb/s devices are forwards compatible with 6 gb/s ports

there are no problems here

So, 4 HDDs, 1SSD, 1 External HDD Connector, and 1 Optical Drive and you don't see a problem with only having 6 ports? Let me help you with some math there buddy. 4 + 1 + 1 + 1 = 7

[Josephdalepi]

So, 4 HDDs, 1SSD, 1 External HDD Connector, and 1 Optical Drive and you don't see a problem with only having 6 ports? Let me help you with some math there buddy. 4 + 1 + 1 + 1 = 7

didnt notice the 2 existing hdds

but yeah, you dont need a raid controller, though that would work

there are splitters that would do what you want, though 4 hdds in raid 0 is getting me 660 MB/s

[Ophidio]

didnt notice the 2 existing hdds

but yeah, you dont need a raid controller, though that would work

there are splitters that would do what you want, though 4 hdds in raid 0 is getting me 660 MB/s

mmm I'm not even running any kind of RAID right now, or as far as I know unless the motherboard runs one type of RAID by default. I was going to mess around with RAID stuff when I did plug in more drives. Do you have a link to a video or forum post that explains the different types of RAID so I can know what to choose? 

[Josephdalepi]

mmm I'm not even running any kind of RAID right now, or as far as I know unless the motherboard runs one type of RAID by default. I was going to mess around with RAID stuff when I did plug in more drives. Do you have a link to a video or forum post that explains the different types of RAID so I can know what to choose? 

heres an easy guide

raid 0 increases speed, but has no redundancy or backup, so if 1 drive fails, you lose all data.  it has an advantage of massive speed

raid 1 is full redundancy, writing the same data to all drives, so its slow but has full redundancy

raid 5 provides redundancy, so if 1 disk goes out, you lose no date

raid 5 does raid 5 but better

so,  in a raid situation

you have 3 1tb drives

raid 0 gives 3 times speed and 3 terrabytes of storage

raid 1 gives 1 tb of storage and base speed or  slower, but full backups and redundancy

raid 3 gives slightly faster seeds and 2 tb or storage, with redundancy so 1 drive can die

raid 6 does raid 5, but a bit slower so it can be more reliable

 

what i suggest is to put all data that is important onto the ssd and store everything else on a raid 0 array

so information of the ssd

games and  such on the raid

[scottyseng]

mmm I'm not even running any kind of RAID right now, or as far as I know unless the motherboard runs one type of RAID by default. I was going to mess around with RAID stuff when I did plug in more drives. Do you have a link to a video or forum post that explains the different types of RAID so I can know what to choose? 

 

In addition to the above, there's RAID10 (A stripe of mirrors). You lose 50% of the space like RAID1, but it's faster because it has four drives to read from. Rebuild times are faster as well.

 

Do note that a proper RAID card (with onboard battery backup) costs $500-700. The cheap entry level RAID cards aren't worth your time / future pains.

 

I think you're better off with a HBA card (Doesn't do RAID, but presents the drive as if you had just plugged them straight into the motherboard). You can use software RAID then.

[PlayCrackTheSky]

So, 4 HDDs, 1SSD, 1 External HDD Connector, and 1 Optical Drive and you don't see a problem with only having 6 ports? Let me help you with some math there buddy. 4 + 1 + 1 + 1 = 7

 

Let me help you with something, buddy.  The post was very poorly written and hard to follow.  Maybe you should read back over it and edit before you try to be a dick. 

 

"but what about the other HDD I have that won't have a port to go into unless I just use the other 3gb/s port which I don't really want to do for a HDD. Oh, and I just remember my external HDD connectors are plugged into the other 3gb/s port so that's every port taken."

 

So...basically the guy wasn't wrong at all.  He said there is no need for a 6 port... true.  You said there was a port available and then immediately followed with every port is taken.  So which is it?