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

[HEXUS]

The storage controller requires active cooling.

Read more.

[shaithis]

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

[MrRockliffe]

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

[Biscuit]

Reminds me of those comedy photoshopped planes



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.

[CampGareth]

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.

[MrComputerSaint]

Bigger is better.

[LeetyMcLeet]

Nope. Needs more

[MMAX63]

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

[MrComputerSaint]

Nope. Needs more

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.

[Tunnah]

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO wanty!

[edzieba]

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.

[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....

[shaithis]

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....

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

[Bonebreaker777]

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.

[shaithis]

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

[Biscuit]

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

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.