There are quite a few boards that have up to eight SATA ports. You pay the premium, but they are around. Most of them are boards with another controller chipset controlling a few other ports and linked via the same bus that you would plug your external card into. Essentially it could be said that there's not much difference to what you have now.bobbob wrote:will do. no-one really answered the other question, if we don't like the pci sata expansion card (and i agree, i'd prefer not to have it) am i really limited to OS drive, optical drive and 3 X internal hard drives? how else can i hook up other HDDs? even most NAS's are limited to 4 disks and i still don't want to go back down that route...
For instance, the Intel X58 chipset controls six SATA ports natively and the slightly old but perfectly formed Asus P6X58D has this and an additional two ports presented via a Marvel controller to the left of the Southbridge.