stupid question about sata on motherboards

This is probably a stupid question, but i'm new to sata and couldn't seem to find the information anywhere else, so here goes:

If a motherboard has, say, 4 SATA ports, does that mean it can take 4 hard drives, or can you run more than one hard drive off a single SATA port? I'm thinking of old-style PATA/IDE where you'd have two 'ports' and each could take two...

If 1 port = 1 drive, then what's the best way of adding extra SATA ports to a system? Presumably a PCI SATA card? Any recommendations, and in particular presumably a PCI-x sata card is best?

Thanks for your help.

yes sata is a serial bus so your stuck with one drive = one port. and yes you can add more ports via a pci add in card. they cost from around a tenner for a cheap and cheerful card upto £400 for a highend raid card. depends on what you want to use it for.

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Originally Posted by alsenior

yes sata is a serial bus so your stuck with one drive = one port. and yes you can add more ports via a pci add in card. they cost from around a tenner for a cheap and cheerful card upto £400 for a highend raid card. depends on what you want to use it for.

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As Alsenior says but also if you are using a sata optical drive it takes up a channel ! :)

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Originally Posted by rory1984

If 1 port = 1 drive, then what's the best way of adding extra SATA ports to a system? Presumably a PCI SATA card? Any recommendations, and in particular presumably a PCI-x sata card is best?

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PCI-X is only the best if your motherboard has PCI-X..

depends what you want really, if its a sata raid card, 3ware cards are highly recommended but very pricey.

alternatively xfx revo64's are cheap and cheerful (at scan at least, usually £20 if they have it on offer), have 3 ports and can set up a raid3 array if required. i have 2 of those in my fileserver.

I've heard that you can get port multipliers to add several devices to a single channel. Although my reading only shows the use of eSATA.

Take a look at this link for the product in question: www.siliconimage.com SiI3726 - 5 Drive SATA300

Have seen these for sale for approximately $128, with a couple of other sites showing them at about $350.

Haven't read all the data sheets to understand it better, but looks promising. I would also presume that SAS drives are connected in a similar way to SATA drives as they should be useable on a SAS controller from my reading.