[clue] SATA port multipliers?

[Sean LeBlanc]

Can anyone recommend a good way to achieve this in consumer-class 
hardware? I have a mobo with 6 SATA ports, but I have 8 drives hooked up 
for my NAS (FreeNAS).


I do this via a card that has at least enough ports to add the 7th and 
8th drive. However, it seems these drives go offline after some time. 
Typically, I have enough time for them to resilver from the last time 
they went offline, and then they go offline again. I think a power 
off/power on cycle will often "fix" this, but I'd be interested in the 
way others deal with getting more SATA ports and/or troubleshooting this 
kind of flakiness. When I browse Amazon, it seems most of these types of 
cards get really low ratings.