1 Jun
2019
1 Jun
'19
3:26 a.m.
Hello,
On Fri, May 31, 2019 at 11:56:54PM +0000, Hugo Mills wrote:
Well, there's plenty of Intel Atom-based boards with 8 to 12 SATA3
ports, e.g.:
https://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/atom/A2SDi-8C-HLN4F.cfm
This is a 2 year old CPU though and after all the various
Spectre/Meltdown mitigations it may have its performance cut
significantly. I also don't know the cost - could be £400+ just for
the board/S-o-C.
AMD EPYC 3000-based boards have a better performance story but I
haven't seen one with more than 4 SATA ports.
There are some Xeon D-15xx boards that can have up to 20 SATA3:
https://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/Xeon3000/#1667
The FlexATX form factor has limited suppliers though, but apparently
Fractal Design do some. Here's a blog post about a system built with
one of these boards and a Fractal Design case that has 10 drive
bays:
https://www.bussink.ch/?p=1766
2016 though. And they still put a CPU fan on it. And the chassis
bays aren't hot swap. And yikes at the cost!
Perhaps it would be best to compromise on the noise front if
possible and just use a regular low end Xeon or AMD CPU with a CPU
fan, so that a non-specialist board could be used.
I found some more recent ideas here:
https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/looking-for-8-bay-hot-swa…
Cheers,
Andy
--
https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
My
requirements for such a machine would be:
- amd64 architecture
- Not immensely power hungry. Doesn't have to be crippled either,
but a CPU that doesn't need active cooling would probably be good.
- At least 10 hot swap 3.5" drive bays connected by SATA, or 8 of
them if I could install a pair of internal flash devices to hold
the OS.
These latter two requirements seem to be impossible to achieve in
the current market, unless you want to go for external port
multipliers. It seems that nobody builds machines with small low-power
chips and lots of SATA ports.