SATA cards compatible?

[barthalamu]

I'm planning on using 6 hot-swap bays and 2 optical drives on my rig, and have already run out of internal SATA ports.

Are there any 3rd party (internal) SATA cards that are compatible with Macs/HackinMacs?

I've seen several cards listed at OWC, but they are all eSATA.
Are there PC cards that would just work with the Jmicron kexts?

 

[flatfoot]

I'm planning on using 6 hot-swap bays and 2 optical drives on my rig, and have already run out of internal SATA ports.

Are there any 3rd party (internal) SATA cards that are compatible with Macs/HackinMacs?

I've seen several cards listed at OWC, but they are all eSATA.
Are there PC cards that would just work with the Jmicron kexts?

Found plenty SATA cards that feature the same JMicron chipset Gigabyte use for their boards via Google. Those should work with MacMan's kext; the only downside is that they only have 2 ports since the JMB363 chipset only supports two.

EDIT: You could also use one of these to multiply one of your internal JMicron ports, which are port-multiplier compatible IIRC (The Intel ports are not.). But keep in mind that the drives connected will be limited to a combined maximum of 384MB/s (3Gbit/s), i. e. 76.8MB/s per drive if all ports on the multiplier are occupied, 96MB/s of 4 are occupied etc. This only applies if they are all accessed at the same time; if you're accessing only one at a time, it will have the whole 3Gbit/s for itself.
I think I'd pick this option over the additional SATA cards though SATA ports can be picky when it comes to port multipliers. I'd definitely give this one a try.

 

[barthalamu]

Cool. I didn't even know that was possible!

Can you boot from drives connected to a multiplied port? HD or DVD?

 

[flatfoot]

Cool. I didn't even know that was possible!

Can you boot from drives connected to a multiplied port? HD or DVD?

From a multiplied port in principle, yes, but I'm not sure the JMicron ports on Gigabyte boards are bootable.