Im completely out of the loop.

Can anyone tell me what is the best motherboard with regards to SATA & the odd IDE port.

Basically I want a motherboard which has room for a lot of drives.

I want IDE for my DVD RW

and I would prefer SATA for all of the hard drives.

I realistically want a minimum of 2, but preferably 4 drives - for a RAID1 array (I dont want to be losing data ever with this.. I want a pretty permanant PC!!

and unlike my current ASUS motherboard, it needs to really be bootable from those SATA - mine seems to be crap, needs an IDE perhaps..   ?!

or is it best to buy a mobo + some SATA controllers (again, need to be able to boot from the PCI then?)

also what is the best CPU at the moment? are AMD still good (my current is an Athlon 2600) because some of the new Intel Dells @ work are :shock: fast! it seems intel is back and have lost the MHZ=speed mentality  (thank goodness - the 2.8 duel core + big caches RAWWWKK!! :mrgreen:) tbh I think I just generally want a new PC, and my current will become an uninportant server of sorts....

I think ill buy an external USB caddie + hard-drive of the same type too to backup too (to prevent file-system corruption, as RAID is still succeptible to human error, etc )

I found an Asus motherboard with 6 SATA and 1 IDE, so I think thatll do me. Its the something SLI Deluxe.

The plan is to stuff it with a RAID10 or 5.

If I go RAID10, itll be 2x in a 0, and then both of them mirrored

5, well thats quite a nice setup too... id be tempted just to go RAID1, but thats overkill with 4 drives and id only have 300GB space that way. Having mirroring & RAID0 you get 600GB :shock: with redundancy.

Will have an external caddie with SATA drive in it too, for external backup - will only be a 300GB though, least you can swap later for a larger drive as capacity is used.

should be fairly safe

it was an AM2 socket mobo though, I added the AMD 3800 processor (which seems to be a higher model just rebadged / underclocked?? - all the specs, apart from MHZ are the same!!!) They only have 1MB L2 Cache on each core, thats 50% less than the Intel offerings.

Unfortunately its time to save up for a few months first - the thing totalled about 980 inc Vat & Delivery :cry:

Ill post the full spec when I can be bothered logging into Dabs again

Yeah, Im toying with a few ideas in the head at the moment.

I think at the end of the day, I want an ultra-stable *nix box to store all of my media.

Thisd be Photos, Music etc.

big capacity, big reliability..

my actual PC at the moment has a 74GB Raptor in it, and I love the speed it brings. the media aspects (were) stored on my 80GB Seagate Baraccuda.

I say were... I decided to blow it all away earlier tonight when changing O/Ss...  something Ill no doubt regret music is easily replaceable - just rip it from my CDs again (I dont DL it from the web) but photos not so... :?