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

[Fluffles]

Ravi Pokala wrote:
> My main concerns are that the networking is well supported (GigE preferred of course), and that there are lots of supported on-board SATA ports. I currently have four SATA drives, so I'd prefer six or eight ports on the new board for growth.
>
> I'd also like decent on-board graphics, on the off chance I want to dual-boot it to play some older games. In FreeBSD, it just needs to be supported enough to give me a VGA console.
>   

You probably won't find 8 SATA ports and onboard video, these two just 
don't match. You either take a high-end board with lots of features, but 
*never* have onboard video (IGP), of you take a microATX board with 
onboard video which have 2 maybe 4 SATA ports.

So you may want to drop this demand and get a PCI videocard and focus on 
boards with lots of Serial ATA connectors. Also be sure to check if 
these are supplied by the chipset (best) or by some second chip on the 
motherboard. Sometimes these 'extra' chips use the old and obsolete PCI 
bus for data transfer, which can be very slow especially in a RAID 
configuration.

Maybe you can search for boards and post them on the mailinglist, so we 
can check if the SATA and gigabit works?

Good luck!
- Veronica