News - ASRock preps the X99 Extreme 11 motherboard with 18 SATA ports

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The storage controller requires active cooling.

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Read more.

18 SATA.....could be the basis of a nice Linux/FreeBSD server.

Jesus this looks like a monster of a motherboard! Great for small servers.

Reminds me of those comedy photoshopped planes

http://i.ytimg.com/vi/iqIMj3lRxbs/hqdefault.jpg

I do struggle with this a little bit though, with the high cost of X99 motherboards, it doesn't make sense as a server board as you could actually just buy a purpose made server board. Even the difference in the chips themselves, Xeon vs i3/5/7 are not particularly substantial.
Does a workstation or desktop user really need 18 drive ports? Im sure there are some who would see a benefit for them but the niche must be really small.

So, how does this work... Let's do some napkin lane calculations. Let's say every sata port runs at full speed at the same time, that's roughly 1 lane per two ports or 8 lanes overall. Then another 8 lanes go on the M.2 ports, so that's 24 available for the rest of the system, unless you're using the cheapest 2011-3 cpu in which case it's 8. That's.... Not actually that bad, it can probably support 2 gpus at least, might feel the effects at 4 gpus. No reason to worry then! Though personally I'd still rather put a SAS card in something to get a billion drives.

Bigger is better.

Nope. Needs more :p

......Nice, but in blue....i realy don´t know if I will pass this one.....lol

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Originally Posted by LeetyMcLeet

Nope. Needs more :p

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But say you'd have 16 Hard drives in a raid array, even at £50 for each drive that's £800 on just hard drives! I wonder if the raid controller can cope with hot swappable tech... perfect for a NAS / small SAN if it is.

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO wanty!

As long as it supports ECC if you put a Xeon in it. No way would I trust that much storage to a system without it.

Wonder if it feature anything over and above Intels X99 raid capabilities? Is it jut Raid 0,1,5 or will it include 10 and/or 6?

I so, that'd be worth looking at. If not, that'd a hell of a lot of storage to be constrained by motherboard functionality, and potentially CPU overhead....

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Originally Posted by Tattysnuc

Wonder if it feature anything over and above Intels X99 raid capabilities? Is it jut Raid 0,1,5 or will it include 10 and/or 6?

I so, that'd be worth looking at. If not, that'd a hell of a lot of storage to be constrained by motherboard functionality, and potentially CPU overhead....

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That's why you go with Linux or BSD with ZFS.

Doubt it will support hardware RAID. Hence the last suggestion toward ZFS is a very valid one.

Doubt x99 MoBos offer ECC, am I right?

On the other hand I wonder if it would support a RAID with different drives or a hybrid RAID, like SSDs for caching and HDDs for capacity.

The X chipsets normally support ECC (including registered IIRC) but you need a Xeon CPU to enable it.

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Originally Posted by shaithis

The X chipsets normally support ECC (including registered IIRC) but you need a Xeon CPU to enable it.

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Im not even sure you need a Xeon for ECC, there are even some Pentium chips that support it, but not the whole range of Intel chips.

It does seem to be disabled on "Haswell Enthusiast" though.