Motherboard with 10 SATA 3.0 ports

6 Years ago way back in 2018 I could buy a motherboard with 10 SATA ports, 10G LAN on board, with 2x1GBe ports as well for just over A$400. Today getting 10G LAN will cost me around A$2000 and at best that is with 8 SATA Ports.

I have a PC running such a motherboard - an ASRock X299 XPower Gaming AC. ok, it's HEDT. I bought it because it had 10G, 10 SATA Ports and 48 PCIe lanes (with the 10th Gen CPU).

I am running a Silverstone ECS-06 6 port SATA 3.0 expansion card which runs like a dog. I have only got 2 drives connected to it, but I'm lucky of I can get 70MB/s out of it. And it hangs regularly. I could be watching a movie from one of the drives connected to it and it will just hang.

The 12 drives I Have are Seagate NAS ST12000VN008 12TB drives (144TB total).
I was planning on upgrading those this year to 12x16TB drives. (192TB total).

My question is this: Is there any manufacturer that makes a Z790 motherboard with 10 sata ports, preferrably with 10G LAN on board, or I can add in a 10G PCIe NIC if not.

I'm damned if I can find such a board.

Or a 4-6 port PCie SATA add in card that actually performs as advertised?

EDIT: Sorry my math is off. Even with 10 SATA ports I'll still need an expansion card for the extra two drives.

With 10G switches and cabling throughout I'd hope for more than 70MB/s... More like 2-3 times that, which I consistently get from the drives attached to the motherboard.

This PC will be a storage monster, with 192TB total storage, plus a 2TB PCIe 4 SSD for boot etc.
It runs Coldfusion, MySQL, IIS, Kodi, and Macrium Reflect,
Hardware wise it has an 850W PSU, a GTX 1660 Ti which I'd also like to upgrade, but as the PC us essentially used as a server this is not high priority..
Currently 32GB DDR4-3600 CL16-16-16 RAM in 4 sticks.

I expect I'll be upgrading to DDR5 so I'm looking at a T-Force 7200 CL32-42-42-84 RAM Kit because it is 1DPC 1R.

NAS is not an option. These cost 10's of thousands of AU dollars for the capacity and speed I want.

I move a lot of data around. I am involved in community basketball and I record games for training and development purposes. The games are kept for years for historical reasons. I have also written some basketball management systems using html/cfml and sql. To support these video and other basketball functions.

Then of course I have my own personal use. Avid movie watcher. Rather than watch from disc I rip them local storage. Only one PC has optical drives.

Due to the nature of the data there are lots of backups. 48TB is dedicated just to backups. Many backups are run multiple times a day and 2 copies are run for each backup. One of the drives is in a removable caddy and is rotated each day through 3 drives so one is always offsite, one offline and one online.

There is more but i won't bore you any more than I have to.

No, there is no raid involved.
There are 6 PCs here. Storage and authoring PCs are separate. I would move 1-4 TB of data a day. Another for people to watch the games in a public space, a test PC and so on.

Aww, heck, I'm probably spoiled too :) I've had 10G LAN for 6 years and I've used PCs that are on 1GB and I find myself getting stressed on such slow networks :)

Haven't checked out server motherboards. I did see some old ones that Gigabyte made, but nothing recent.

I was kind of hoping to just keep everything standardized. I have upgraded all PCs to Z790, and 13th Gen CPUs (14th wasn't available when I upgraded). This is the last PC to be upgraded.

If there is no such thing as 10 sata ports anymore, then that's life. I can always build another PC to split the storage. Will run up higher electricity costs, which is pain given current tariffs, but if that's how it has to be, so be it.

EDIT: NAS - Cost. 12 bays, with 10GB LAN that can support MULTIPLE CONCURRENT 10GB connections are few and far between. The wording manufacturers use to make you think you can get good speeds out of NAS setups is very misleading. I've been down the NAS road more than once, and each time they fell short performance wise. But that aside, A$15,000 for a NAS unit (or stacked units if one isn't big enough), with the drive costs on top is somewhat out of my budget.

Drives are resealable. I move them on before they run out of warranty to keep my out of pockets costs down.

Case is not an issue. I have a Fractal Design Meshify 2 and define 7 XL which each support up to 18 drives. I've added in the extra HDD trays. I also have a spare 12 trays if I need to build a second machine.

The Z790 Proart is the same one I came across and was what I was planning to buy, until I started having trouble with the add-in card after only 2 weeks of owning it. It's been unreliable ever since.

The sad thing all of the needs could be met 6 years ago. Lots of ports, high speed NICs, lots of PCIe lanes (on HEDT). I never had a need I couldn't fill. I'm pining for the days of the HEDT systems

Boards with 8 ports are available. I guess 10 is now out of the question. Technology has gone backwards in many ways. Not surprising as it's all about profit and not consumer demand.

Games are recorded and edited in 4K. I'm concerned more with quality than with space efficiency. If I run out of space I'll just buy more. Spinner space is cheap - well generally. There are capacities that retailers just exploit price on which makes using that capacity ridiculously expensive.

Cloud is a no-no. Rightly, as you put it, I have no control over the safety of my own data, in may ways.

I'll stick with the Z790 ProArt. I'll build a second system so I can eliminate the unreliable add-in card and that will then give me capacity for 16 drives over two systems. Still cheaper than a NAS, and faster.

jshs2020 said:

Boards with 8 ports are available. I guess 10 is now out of the question. Technology has gone backwards in many ways. Not surprising as it's all about profit and not consumer demand.

LOL I'll bet there is little or no 'consumer demand' for motherboards with 10 SATA ports. Likely even 8 ports is an outlier. 4 ports or less is where the 'consumer demand' sweet spot is.

AK6DN said:

LOL I'll bet there is little or no 'consumer demand' for motherboards with 10 SATA ports. Likely even 8 ports is an outlier. 4 ports or less is where the 'consumer demand' sweet spot is.

I wasn't referring only to sata ports, but you're probably right. The people I mix with are all missing the days of HEDT. "Enthusiasts", but the numbers of those are few and dwindling.

jshs2020 said:

I wasn't referring only to sata ports, but you're probably right. The people I mix with are all missing the days of HEDT. "Enthusiasts", but the numbers of those are few and dwindling.

Well I was just going off the title of the thread ... "Motherboard with 10 SATA 3.0 ports"