Terry said:
My eyes are not good.
A friend of mine says this is the mobo he has.
He also says he can have 8 SATA drives.
Does this mobo have SATA 8 ports?
Can 1 SATA port do 2 drives?
Four SATA ports are hosted by the Nvidia Southbridge.
Four SATA ports are hosted by a SIL3114R on the PCI bus.
The SIL3114 has provision for operating on a 32 bit PCI bus,
at 66MHz, but desktop computers seldom have the ability to
support operation of a 66MHz PCI interface. So the SIL3114
will have some bandwidth limitations, which you'd run into
if using some of the RAID configurations. For accessing a
single disk at a time, that is not an issue.
SIL3114 info.
http://www.siliconimage.com/products/product.aspx?id=28
Downloading the user manual, is where you go to start answering
such a question. Followed by digging for info on the peripheral
chips, such as the SIL3114 in this case.
You can find some info on Nvidia motherboard chipsets, here.
http://www.nvidia.com/page/nforce4_family.html
http://www.nvidia.com/page/pg_20041014863476.html
SATA ports can support more than one drive. The
function is called a port multiplier. The trick is
verifying whether these will work with just any
SATA port. I would check with the vendor, before
buying one of these, because maybe they need a
SATA II port (it is possible "FIS based switching",
is a feature of later implementations, rather than
some of the earlier ones).
http://www.siliconimage.com/products/product.aspx?id=26
http://www.sataport.com/
http://www.siliconimage.com/docs/SiI-DS-0121-C1.pdf
"Full support for FIS-based switching and command-based
switching SATA host controllers"
Some chips state they have some level of support, such as
this Jmicron chip.
http://www.jmicron.com/Product_JMB361.htm
"Supports Port Multiplier with Command-based Switching on SATA II port"
So it is possible to control more than one drive from a SATA
port, but requires checking before purchase of the
necessary accessories. I haven't run into any first
person accounts, of the use of a port multiplier box.
Paul
