I have a custom built desktop computer with the DQ77MK motherboard. It was built in 2013 by a gentleman whom I'm not sure can help me with it anymore. If I had been building this and was given the information I gave him I'm sure I would not have selected this motherboard. We are professional photographers and the main areas I have to be concerned about are speed and storage. The speed and power are fine, the ability to add storage is not. There are only five SATA connectors on this motherboard, four are currently being used for the main SSD drive, a secondary 2TB storage drive, DVD payer and I'm not sure what the other is being use for. The fifth is under the massive graphics card installe. And I'm not sure this fifth SATA port actually works. I've tried to connect two different hard drives to this port and could not get either one to work. I currently have another healthy drive that I want to try but haven't had the time yet. The graphics card is so close to the only open PCI connector that I can't get a card into it. There is a USB card in the PCI Express connector that I may be able to switch out but I would prefer not to lose these. There are only three, two if you don't count the port for the video card, expansion PCI ports on this motherboard. The guy who built this for me gave me a case with something like 8 extra bays and told me that adding extra storage would be an easy process. But he put in a motherboard with absolutely no expansion capabilities that I can tell and also has a 2TB limit on the drives.I can't even replace the currently installed extra drive with a larger one. I'm going crazy trying to figure out how to make this work the way I want it to.
Because of the lack of internal expansion options, what I want to do is connect a MediaSonic Probox and run my storage drives through it. It will run on USB or eSATA, preferable the SATA as USB speeds are way to slow, something like 25mps. This box, to run correctly needs to access an eSATA port with port multiplier capabilities. As far as I can tell none of the SATA ports have this Multiplier capability.
There are two components on the motherboard that is accessed through the back panel that I would like to upgrade. The top one has two high current USB ports (will never use), one IEEE port (will never use, either) and an eSATA port. The other component has two 2.0 USB ports and what looks like an empty access bay.Is there any way, at the very least, to upgrade that eSATA port to support Port Multiplier? Or at best, replace these two components with something I can put to better use. I would like to have at the very least two eSATA with Port Multiplier capabilities and some more high speed USB ports, 3.0.
Is it possible to upgrade or change out these back panel components?
Thank you,
Linda