Looking for a motherboard with lots of SATA ports, supported in 6.2-STABLE

[soralx at cydem.org]

> I had actually been looking at that board (GA-965G-DS3) before
> mailing the list, but I was concerned about the Marvell 8056 NIC and
> Gigabyte SATA controller.

I should probably warn you against getting that board. I bought my first
Gigabyte S478 mainboard in 2002 or 2003. That one had a very buggy BIOS;
in fact, I send Gigabyte an email documenting the numerous bugs I found,
but, unsurprisingly, they ignored it. A lot of annoying bugs, however
nothing critical.

A couple of weeks ago I figured time for upgrade was about ripe, but had
a hard time choosing a mainboard (and the rest of components, for that
mater). I read good reviews of GA-965 board, so GA-965P-DS3 it was...
In the hindsight, this is the fourth time this year I find that I
should not have trusted reviews, professional or not, no matter how
many of them are there. In so many years, you'd think that Gigabyte
would get their act together and quit making unusable BIOSes, right?
One could only guess whether they just don't care, or simply aren't
brilliant programmers, to put it mildly.

First of all, the board just wouldn't power up from time to time; does
not happen often, but consider that I depend on the machine wherever I
am, and noone cancelled power failures yet. Secondly, when I hooked up
7 hard drives to it, one SCSI, it refused to boot from that SCSI disk.
It simply disappeared from the list! (but gets detected by the HBA)
Very frustrating. And where did the basic (BIOS: _basic_ IO) settings
of boot-up NumLock and keyboard rate go? What about voltage monitors:
just says 'OK' instead of voltage levels -- wtf? Yet they added a fancy
(and rather ridiculous) "automatic overclock" functionality there
(BTW, overclocking with this board isn't that impressive). Right, to
hell with the basic stuff -- after all, it's all about impressing
customers and marketing (you hear me, Gigabyte and Intel?), ain't it? 

During the course of assembling my new machine, I've had two WD5000YS
disks fail (one lasted a week, the other -- 2.5 months; WDC refuse to
replace them too, saying "out of region", which is bulls... talk), a new
"quality" PSU died in 10 minutes (and behave very strange), a SATA
controller with data corruption(!), a videocard that suspends my
LCD depending on which characters are on the console screen (e.g., BIOS
boot menu, file delete dialog in mc), a buggy, slightly unstable
mainboard (that Giabyte one), and a case that isn't nearly worth the
money in reality, despite not a single review giving that impression
(in fact, it'd be hard to find a review mentioning bad things that
matter about the Lian-Li V1000+ case). The only thing that impressed me
positively was the CPU.

But enough whining -- it could go on and on. The important thing to
take note from from this rant is that today is not like old days -- put
together a system, and it just works. Choose components carefully.

And also, note my disgruntled state :) GA-965 might be not as bad as I
described it (although...). It works so far, and the hardware will
probably last no worse that all Gigabyte boards (if not more --
manufacturers finally started to pay attention to our complaints about
poor quality capacitor). So if it's good enough for your purpose, and
you don't mind all the bugs and quirks, then by all means don't listen
to me %-) I would recommend considering e.g. an Intel board, for teh
rest of you folks though.

[SorAlx]  ridin' VN1500-B2