I have a 45 drive system, currently with 30 drives in it.
It has 3 PCIe 1.0 1x cards with Silicon Image chips designed for PCI-X. They are each connected to 3 multipliexers of unknown make.
This may offend you, and I can understand why. However, I run it for two very important reasons:
- It was free.
- It does what I need it to do
Having said that, I do get notified of ATA errors on ocassion and I think it’s probably at the limit of how many drives it can actually handle regardless of how many ports are on hand.