Been playing with this old 8bay HDD enclosure which uses the ol' SiL3726 port multipliers. I know there is the good ol' SiL3132 chipset which supports two multipliers but being old, it is limited by single PCIe 1.0 line and also 2 TB max per drive. Also there is a potential problem with this thing corrupting data under certain scenarios at least under Linux.
I have yet to test that but think that the multipliers itself do not care about HDD size so more modern chipset should support unlimited HDD capacity. The problem is to find a chipset which suports TWO SATA multipliers at once. I have sucessfully tested the onboard ASMedia ASM1061 to see all 8 drives, though they only appear in the detection and under Linux, Win 7 only saw 4 drives. Maybe that was driver problem but who knows.
Does anybody here KNOW some other PCIe SATA controller which uses more modern controller and has confirmed support for two multipliers simultaneously with 8 drives total?
I have yet to test that but think that the multipliers itself do not care about HDD size so more modern chipset should support unlimited HDD capacity. The problem is to find a chipset which suports TWO SATA multipliers at once. I have sucessfully tested the onboard ASMedia ASM1061 to see all 8 drives, though they only appear in the detection and under Linux, Win 7 only saw 4 drives. Maybe that was driver problem but who knows.
Does anybody here KNOW some other PCIe SATA controller which uses more modern controller and has confirmed support for two multipliers simultaneously with 8 drives total?
Half of the computer problems is caused by bad contacts 
(or wait until someday I get a machine with a SAS backplane...)