Re: X58 motherboard question
 

That achieves nothing, I run raid 0 on those 250s, I'll still end up 2 Sata ports down ;)

Re: X58 motherboard question
 

Using larger drives achieves having more space which is presumably what you want if you're looking to upgrade your storage by installing a SATA PCI card?

Re: X58 motherboard question
 

No, I'm looking to add another BluRay drive, and another 1.5TB Seagate to Mirror my Rd 5 and 0
I guess I could replace my 2 Hot Spares in the Rd 5 with the BluRay drive and 1.5TB Mirror, but that means rebuilding my Raid again.

I personally think companys need to move to ETX boards, most people that would get them have the cases, and it means that you could fit Quad Sli/Crossfire, and still use the PCI slots for raid cards, tv tuners etc, without the now Dual Slot GPUs blocking those ports like they do in ATX boards.

Re: X58 motherboard question
 

Aye but if you had more storage on fewer drives you'd be able to add an extra BluRay drive without needing an extra port.

Re: X58 motherboard question
 

But less drives means no Raid 5 for my OS and Games, and my OS, since It has to be on Raid cause 10k drives are way outa my budget, has to be a Raid 5 considering its an intergrated raid controller (Often very flaky).

I could ditch the two 250s and upgrade all three 320s to give me the storage I need, but then I've payed, at the time, 70$ for each 250 and 80-90$ for each 320GB drive, which will no longer get used, and I don't wanna throw that type of cash away so easily.
Being HDDs and cheap as chips, They won't sell for peanuts

Re: X58 motherboard question
 

So you'd keep the 320GB drives in RAID 5 and replace the 200GB ones. Means you're only replacing 2 drives rather than 3+ and you keep the other drives in RAID 5. Even if you were to put a pair of fairly large drives (say 1TB) in RAID 0 to replace the 250GB ones it would still work out cheaper than a decent SATA card with a reasonable number of ports.

Re: X58 motherboard question
 

Yes, but replaceing two 250s with 1TBs is both expensive, and doesn't free up sata ports, something most companys like to lack

I don't just want more storage, Im happy with my current 1.1TB, But I still need another two sata ports one for another BluRay drive, and one for a mirror 1.5TB drive
External 1.5s are just to expensive I find, and lack in speed, and that means software raid :S

Re: X58 motherboard question
 

So I have the Gigabyte board, for $470, the Asus board for $669, and the DFI board for $750+. So is there any operative difference in CPU stability and reliability between the three? Because obviously if the differences don't matter to me or are insignificant in comparison to the price difference, I would rather get the cheapest one and put the money to use somewhere else.

Another question, what is the difference between PCIe and 2.0, and what is the difference between x16 and x8?

...why? I think 1.3TB is quite enough for the conceivable future, 1.6 if I decide to add another Velociraptor in RAID 0. And that takes four SATA ports, not 10.

Re: X58 motherboard question
 

Well, the thing is that people that actually know what they're doing have no problems with the board. Go look on forums where people set world records for overclocking (ocf, or XS) and ask them if DFI boards suck.

For your motherboard. You are clearly in the minority. There is no need for larger motherboards. If anything motherboards are going to get smaller. If you need more SATA ports get a PCI sata card for your blue-ray drives. You dont want to get a RAID card so get that and use your onboard ports for RAID.


pendantic - I would say go for the Asus board. The i7 asus boards are highly regarded by high end overclockers. Great for maxing out your CPU be it on air, water, or extreme cooling.
PCIe 2.0 is the second revision of PCIe. It has half the latency and twice the bandwidth. So a PCIe 2.0 8x slot performs the same as a PCIe 16x slot. The only way the difference matters between 16x and 8x is if you are going to run crossfire 4870X2's

Re: X58 motherboard question
 

Ahhhhhh the joys of having a VelociRaptor and 3TB of storage in an external box. :p