Question So lost about what's needed for 8 HDDs (SATA cables/SATA power/splitter?)

[Mr.Vegas]

No, its better to get ones that actually fit the case and port locations.

Some, a left facing angle
Some, a right facing angle
Some, straight through

Some cases and locations, a combination of all 3.

There is no single best.

Thats exactly what i said, "cables that point towards the motherboard"

 

[SkyNetRising]

I'm using this type of cables in my full tower case.
70cm reaches and fits everything. Angled connector goes into drive end.

 

[takearushfan82]

Its better to get angled cables for ease of use that point from HDD towards the mobo, i buy them on aliexpress, but if you dont have time, get whataver you can find on amazon, cable lenth is standrt more or less , usually they always longer then what you need.

ASROCK has 2Gb/s bandwidth for the 8 ports, at least mine does, its more then enough for all HDDS.
Also the friend that said you cant use them together didn't mean you CANT use them, its that if bandwidth is shared when you use them together the speed drops, thats it, but you can use them all at the same time.

But modern HDDs are 250MB/s so x8 thats exactly 2Gb/s to use them at same time.

You put my mind at ease. Thank you so much. I was so worried about not being able to use all 8 simultaneously.

 

[USAFRet]

You put my mind at ease. Thank you so much. I was so worried about not being able to use all 8 simultaneously.

Available bandwidth is only part of it.
Available ports can also be a concern.

It seems on this board, that even if one were to use an NMVe drive, none of the SATA ports are disabled.
That is not always the case.

 

[John Chesterfield]

All that hotrod hardware, and a spinning 18TB hard drive as the OS.

While there are probably worse configurations, I'm struggling to think of one.

I'm surprised more posters haven't hit on this, at least get an SSD as your OS drive even if the rest have to be spinning rust.

 

[thestryker]

All of the SATA ports should work just fine (also power splitters if needed are fine hdds don't pull much power), but you really need to know the case layout to know proper lengths. Generally speaking longer than you need should be fine as you can route excess behind the motherboard tray.

That being said it seems like no practical considerations as far as protecting data is concerned. First of all absolutely none of the storage drives should be used for OS. You're asking for premature data failure not to mention how poorly the system will run. At minimum there should be a single M.2, but if it's being used for more then adding a second would be smart.

As far as protecting against drive failure you could use software to protect or Intel's hybrid solution (which I believe is mostly if not all software these days) to run RAID 5. This is better than nothing, but still isn't really a great solution. I've run a SNB based Xeon Windows server box for over a decade and switched all drives in my array once, but I've still had 1 drive failure in each of the two arrays. I'm using a hardware RAID card in that system however and most modern ones don't have the same feature sets until you start spending a lot of money ($700-800+).

Realistically if you're not going hardware and not going with a storage oriented OS you're asking for failure.

 

[USAFRet]

@takearushfan82

If you had asked here before buying the parts....you have ended up with a less expensive, and better performing system.

But oh well.