As I mentioned in my previous entry, my search for a motherboard with at least 6-8 SATA ports had begun. Well last night I found a seller of a second hand Asus P5W64 WS Pro from OCAU so off I went in the middle of the night to pick it up. Very excited to get home and start putting it together, unfortunately I’ve hit a minor stumbling block, the Antec 430W PSU I planned on using only had a 4 pin EPS and this motherboard requires an 8 pin which I did not have. Needless to say, this has set me back a day or two before I can start the build.
I have however built a test FreeNas box in the interim using an old Lenovo PC I had laying around, powered by an older Pentium D processor and only having two SATA ports available, I slapped my new Samsung HD203WI in there in Software RAID0. I’ve been quite impressed with the transfer speeds @ an average of about 320Mbps (40MB/s) of course this is a conservative figure as the speed does fluctuate hitting as much 520Mbps.
It’s looking good so far.