There are also SATA port multipliers, but those will be
dependent on the software driving the original port, and
field reports on how those work are pretty scarce.
For example, this box takes a SATA port from the motherboard,
and allows five SATA disks to be connected. I think I read
somewhere that the max fanout might be 15 disks multiplied
in this way, from one port. But the thing is, the poor
BIOS on the motherboard would go nuts, figuratively speaking,
if it found 15 SATA drives sharing an ordinary Southbridge
port. So I would not buy one of these for my motherboard
today, at least until some review site experiments with the
concept a bit. Right now, a typical use for one of these, is
with a separate SATA chip on a motherboard, that only has
one or two ports. The RAID software for a select few of those
chips, can understand finding a port multiplier connected
to the port. Motherboard chipsets probably don't have that
kind of function (yet). (Imagine the mess on the BIOS
screen, if they had to find room to display the statistics
for 15 drives!)
http://www.cooldrives.com/cosapomubrso.html
As for the SATA port itself, the expectation is that a port
has a one-to-one connection to a device at the other
end of the cable. Unlike the ribbon cable used for your
current IDE drives, you won't find SATA cables with two
drives connected to the same cable. So the SATA drive is
always "master" in a way, as there is never a "slave".
In terms of SATA cables, one difference between the "old"
cables and the "new" cables, is some of the new ones have
a latching mechanism. If the motherboard SATA connector is
designed to work with the latch, you end up with a more
secure connection for the cable. Some of the early adopters
of SATA, had trouble with cables falling off. No matter
what SATA cable you buy, it should be suitable for operation
at 1.5Gb/sec or 3.0Gb/sec.
And if you like to look at expensive things you can never
afford, here is an Areca RAID controller with 16 SATA ports
on it. It is a bit less than $1000. You can plug one of these
into the second video card slot on an SLI motherboard.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16816151005
There is even a version of that product line, that has 24 SATA
ports on it. But it needs a PCI-X slot, which you typically
find on a server motherboard.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16816151004
HTH,
Paul
