Adding more drives to motherboard with two SATA slots only?

Question

Hardware n00b, building a freeNAS 8 box.

Motherboard has 2 SATA slots: http://www.jetway.com.tw/jw/motherboard_view.asp?productid=309&proname=M26GT3-SVP All 3 PCI slots are empty.

I have 3 more harddrives (500GB UATA, 120GB SATA, 115GB IDE) that I want to add INSIDE the case, not via USB. I will NOT be using RAID in any way, shape or form.

My problem: I'm out of slots on the motherboard, and I don't have powercables to more than two drives.

Is there a PCI card (Promise SATA 300 TX4 ?), or other solution that can fix motherboard connection for more disks (mixed IDE/SATA) and power ?

Answer 1

Well, the best option for getting more powercables is really to get a better power supply - you arn't planning on cramming 3 hard drives into a MATX case, right?

I'm assuming you have used your IDE connector already, since you could probably plug in the UATA and IDE drives there. I'd probably suggest getting a PCI-E Sata host interface Card (mostly x1, but you can plug it into your x16 slot), and using PATA-> Sata converters to mount the IDE drives if you can't use the onboard ones.