I am in the process of planning a fanless/silent media server, and I have found that none of the consumer oriented, embedded, mini-itx motherboards have more than 4 sata ports. To that end it looks like I will need a card to add enough Sata ports. Has anyone here experimented with a sata port multiplier, if so did it work well? My main concern in speed since I will be using software based redundancy (i.e. snapraid, aufs, greyhole, etc. idk which yet), and I will be using this as a Plex server with transcoding.
Also, I am running OMV inside of Windows Hyper-V Server core, and I'm not sure if that will help me or hurt me. Any input would be appreciated, or if you know of any non-server (i.e. cheap) mini-itx motherboards that would remove the need for a sata card card that would be great too. Cheers!