Mobo with most PCI slots? (5 or more)

[Am*]

Does anybody know where I can find a decent new motherboard with preferably 5 or more PCI slots? I'm having a hard time finding one on 1155 or AM3 or any decent up-to-date socket.

[spoon_]

PCI? That's yesterdays technology though... Same reason you don't have FDD and IDE connectors anymore. Can't you get PCI-e one and use raisers?

[Am*]

No. I need PCI slots for my killer NAS builds, as the PCI SATA cards cost less than a third of the price of PCI-E versions, even ones using the EXACT SAME CONTROLLER. And raisers cost even more, so that's not an option.

And whether it's yesterday's technology or last century's technology, it still has far more uses and choice than PCI-E.

[brookheather]

You can get a Gigabyte 1156 motherboard with 4 x PCI slots:

http://www.gigabyte.com/products/pro...px?pid=3502#ov

[wilson5393]

you can't use lastest cpu on 1156 motherboard

there is Adapter turn pci-e 1x to pci

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/asus-...i-d-sub-(vga)- you can get 5 account in pci-e 1x

[alsenior]

can i just ask what cards your using? with pci your limited by the bus to 125MB/s over all of the slots. it would be a far better option to get a cheapish sas controller off ebay like the IBM M1015. it would be faster and better to cable. if you lucky you can pick them up for about £50.

[jackjack]

Does anybody know where I can find a decent new motherboard with preferably 5 or more PCI slots? I'm having a hard time finding one on 1155 or AM3 or any decent up-to-date socket.

how about this one

Foxconn H61AP LGA 1155 Intel H61 ATX Intel Motherboard

Specification :
H61AP-S
Intel® H61 Chipset Sandybridge processors
Dual channel DDR3 1333/1066 x 2 DIMMs, Max. 16GB
1* PCIe2.0 x16, 6*PCI
2* USB3.0 ports
4* SATA II , 2* SATAIII
5.1 channel HDA, Gigabit Lan

Source : foxconnchannel

[Am*]

You can get a Gigabyte 1156 motherboard with 4 x PCI slots:

http://www.gigabyte.com/products/pro...px?pid=3502#ov

Damn that's pretty good...you've even got IDE on that...thanks for your help!

how about this one

Foxconn H61AP LGA 1155 Intel H61 ATX Intel Motherboard

Specification :
H61AP-S
Intel® H61 Chipset Sandybridge processors
Dual channel DDR3 1333/1066 x 2 DIMMs, Max. 16GB
1* PCIe2.0 x16, 6*PCI
2* USB3.0 ports
4* SATA II , 2* SATAIII
5.1 channel HDA, Gigabit Lan

Source : foxconnchannel

HOLY CRAP...6 PCI slots?!!! That's a helluva good find dude. Thanks a lot. Looks like we've got a clear winner here, not even my PIII motherboard has that many slots. CHEERS!

Now it's time to hunt someone down in the UK that sells these babies...

[Am*]

can i just ask what cards your using? with pci your limited by the bus to 125MB/s over all of the slots. it would be a far better option to get a cheapish sas controller off ebay like the IBM M1015. it would be faster and better to cable. if you lucky you can pick them up for about £50.

I've already picked up 7x 4 port SATA controllers for just over the price of that one controller you mentioned. And I'm only using them to store & share data over LAN from the 8x 2TB drives I have now and the 24x 2TB drives I'll buy later when prices drop, nothing else. All I need is for each of these drives to read about 8MB/second each to stream some Bluray rips and they can do more than that with the cheap controllers I've got now, so I think I'd rather stick with them for now.

[jackjack]

HOLY CRAP...6 PCI slots?!!! That's a helluva good find dude. Thanks a lot. Looks like we've got a clear winner here, not even my PIII motherboard has that many slots. CHEERS!

Now it's time to hunt someone down in the UK that sells these babies...

Glad it helps
Happy hunting bro

[mikerr]

I've already picked up 7x 4 port SATA controllers for just over the price of that one controller you mentioned. And I'm only using them to store & share data over LAN from the 8x 2TB drives I have now and the 24x 2TB drives I'll buy later when prices drop, nothing else.

Interested in how you're going to mount and power 8 or 24 drives in one system?

[Funkstar]

Interested in how your going to mount and power 8 or 24 drives in one system?

Personally I would use this: http://www.xcase.co.uk/x-case-home-s...meserver24.htm

[Am*]

Interested in how your going to mount and power 8 or 24 drives in one system?

I'll be running them all in several cheap £20 external racks (each one holds 5 or 6 3.5" HDDs I think) and I am powering most of them from one 600W PSU with three way SATA and molex splitters.

Personally I would use this: http://www.xcase.co.uk/x-case-home-s...meserver24.htm

That is a nice convenient option but unfortunately way too expensive and is unnecessary. 95% of the cost is going towards the hot swap bays, which I will never use anyway. The price of this case alone is more than double the cost of the actual server build I have (minus the drives of course).

[dave87]

Wait till you have to change a drive - then you will see how valuable a case like that is

[Funkstar]

And with that many drives, the chances of having to change ut faulty drives is pretty high.

When I do eventually re-built my server, I'm going to migrate to RAID-6 so I still have some redundancy while I'm re-building after a lost drive. Rebuilding an array is always a sphincter clenching exercise!

[Am*]

And with that many drives, the chances of having to change ut faulty drives is pretty high.

When I do eventually re-built my server, I'm going to migrate to RAID-6 so I still have some redundancy while I'm re-building after a lost drive. Rebuilding an array is always a sphincter clenching exercise!

I can't see a point in running RAID just for some redundancy, there are far too many drawbacks that come with it (high power consumption, volatile and expensive controllers etc). I just use daily scheduled backups that clone each entire drive to another -- completely hassle free, as it is scheduled at 3:00 in the morning.