4/8/10 Hard Drives

[meowmeowMeowmeow]

Hello,

Can anyone tell me how I can have 4 or 8 or even 10 hard drives in a PC(not external) thanks in advance

[Lurick]

Some of the larger cases support lots of drives and you need a board with a lot of SATA ports. Some have upwards of 12 or 14 ports even on certain server boards.

[iRileyx]

Most motherboard's have atleast 4 SATA ports so quite easy to get the 4 in there. (My B250 board has 6)

 

Then throw in 1 or 2 of those as needed

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Green-FR4-SATA-III-6Gbps-4-Port-PCI-Express-Controller-Card-w-Cable-Driver-CD-/332146820688

 

The biggest problem will be finding space to put that many drives.

[Ophidio]

You get a motherboard that has enough sata ports for that many drives or you can get sata cards and use PCI-E slots to give yourself more sata ports. Just get a large case with a huge drive bay area. My case I'm using right now supports 8 HDD then SSD's you can just stuff wherever.

 

If you want to use RAID though you will need to get RAID cards for any drive that you can't plug in directly to your mobo. Also if you want RAID you need to make sure your mobo supports it. 

 

[YedZed]

But why?

[ProjectBox153]

Motherboards these days often have lots of SATA ports, even on my old EVGA nForce 680i SE SLI board. It has a lot. You have to find somewhere in the case to put that many drives though, and sometimes that can be a challenge.

[meowmeowMeowmeow]

My PC has 10 SATA Cables so does that mean I can have 10 HDDs?

[AshleyAshes]

With big cases.

 

[Jarsky]

1 hour ago, AshleyAshes said:

With big cases.

 

You can put lots of drives in small cases too:

 

But yes there are plenty of case choices out there depending on your use. Something like the Node 804 can fit 8 drives in a small mATX case - or something like the Silverstone DS380 for an ITX build, or of course full mid towers like my 400R

 

You can either use a motherboard with lots of SATA ports - some newer chipsets easily support 12+ SATA ports.

You can expand your SATA ports using cheap add on SATA cards, or you can use a dedicated SAS HBA (Serial Attached SCSI Host Bus Adapter)  with breakout cables to plug all your drives in, which are typically a much better idea for servers dedicated to storage due to the dedicated processor & memory. Mainstream HBA's are also very well supported by storage OS's