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 Post subject: Access more SATA ports?
PostPosted: Tue Jul 10, 2012 11:02 pm 
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I just modded my EX495 with a VGA cable and am able to boot into BIOS now using a USB keyboard. One thing I noticed poking around is that there are 6 SATA ports. Well, with 4 drive bays, I'm assuming there's 2 unused ports on the board. Maybe the SATA chip just doesn't have those pins connected? Or maybe they go into the backplane and end???

Has anyone looked around to see if there's any way to access those last 2 ports? I'd really like to fit a small SSD in there as the primary drive & still have the 4 bays for data drives. Just wondering if there might be a way to do that with 1 of these unused ports?

--Dan


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PostPosted: Wed Jul 11, 2012 11:22 am 
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The controller may support 6 devices but there are only 4 ports available. There are plenty of pictures of the motherboard and backplane if you want to take a look.

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PostPosted: Wed Jul 11, 2012 3:32 pm 
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Rather than figuring out if its possible to modify an EX49x to utilize 6 SATA Ports, its easier just to add a port multiplier eSATA or USB to expand storage capacity especially since you would be placing the drives outside the enclosure anyway.

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PostPosted: Fri Jul 20, 2012 8:38 pm 
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Indeed. I think it's a function of the controller in that it supports multiple ports, even if the advertised (i.e. 6) number really aren't present. I too have an EX49x server (the EX490) and it claims to have 6 ports when in fact there really are 4. There is an eSATA port on the back, but that's on a completely separate I/O controller, a Silicon Image 3132 controller (which supports up to 4 or 5 drives in an enclosure).

Another example of these "mystery ports" is my laptop. The Intel RST software tells me it sees my SSD on port 0, the secondary (internal) HDD on port 4, the BD-ROM on port 1 and port 5 is empty. Hmm...that means there must be ports 2 and 3 as well, right? I know where port 5 is -- it's my eSATA port. And then there are those 2 that just don't exist. Since the controllers in the EX48x and EX49x are also Intel ICH controllers, my guess is Intel makes most of their controllers to have 6 port headers, and so the controller reports 6 ports even if there are only 4....or fewer.

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