Decent motherboard

[swordfish1]

I am looking for a mobo with 8 or more SATA connectors, at least 4 of which with RAID5 support (ICH7R). Do you know such?

 

[Silent_Bob]

can you please put a little bit more info on what you are looking for... umm like amd/intel, agp/pci-e, etc, etc

thanks

 

[Person]

Price range, chip type and Graphics port type.

 

[nGAGEd55]

AFAIK most of the Gigabyte Nforce 4 SLI mobos hav 4x SATA and 4x SATAII, and i might be wrong, but i think SATAII is backwards compatible with normal SATA, so then u'll end up with 8 SATA connections. Thats if im not wrong bout the compatibility. I also think they have some sort of RAID, not sure tho.

 

[4cer]

And with SAta2 you can buy connectors that split those ports into 3 SATA ports.

 

[swordfish1]

wow, sorry, I though that saying the bridge type (ICH7R) would be enough to clarify that I am looking for Intel.

I need it for my home server so having on-board graphics is a bonus, but not mandatory. Obviously it must have PCIe x16 port, not AGP, you don't get ICH7R and AGP together anyway I think.

Person, haven't decided on max price but if it is under R1500 for the board only will be great. Intel 955X or 945P/G chipset (must be with ICH7R bridge), PCIe graphics

nGAGEd55, I can't use Nforce chipset as it doesn't support Intel Matrix Storage and RAID5.

4cer, can you explain this in more details? So I can connect 3 drives on a single SATA2 port? In other words if I have 4 connector I can connect 4x3=12 drives? Are you sure that this is supported properly and it is working at full speed?

If that's the case, then board with 4 connectors will do fine. I want to put 4 drives in a raid 5 configuration and one standalone for a start, and maybe later add more drives.

thanks for the help