Does the ASM1061chip support 8TB Hard Drives?

[TowTruckJoe]

I would like to know if the ASM1061 chipset support 8TB and larger hard drives with port multiplying? I'm considering buying a two port ASM1061 based card and using it with two 1:5 multipliers. This would be used as storage for single file access only. Bandwidth should not be an issue. 

[Christopher (Drashna)]

It should, but I don't have the hardware to verify this. Sorry. 

[PocketDemon]

With the onboard asm1061 eSATA controllers on a handful of motherboards I've owned, whilst they'd work perfectly with a single drive, I had unresolvable issues with port multiplying due to the drives switching off & having to reboot to get them back on again - & completely lost the will to live trying different driver versions.

Now, for historical reasons, I'd bought one that uses the Marvell 88SX7042 controller - in my case the StarTech PEXSATA24E, but there are others - &, whilst I couldn't get port multiplying to work beyond driver version 1.2.0.1049, it's been rock solid with the 4 different DASes I've owned at different times over the last decade or so.

Okay, the card (or rather cards, as I bought a 2nd one at a point for another machine - & have hung onto in case it's needed for something as they're reliable) I own still isn't particularly cheap new - but, depending on location, there's often good prices on 2nd hand ones on eBay... ...or you could obviously look for an alt with the same controller.

[TubularBells]

It will probably support the 8TB drive and maybe support two port multipliers.  I have used a asm1061 eSATA controller with 10TB drives.  My challenge is the number of drives.  The best card I have would only support up to 2 port multipliers or 10 drives and behaved badly when I attached 8 drives on each of the two ports for 16 drives total.  I have tried a number of cards that will only support 1 port multiplier and 4 or 5 drives per port.  Every motherboard eSata port I tried did not support a port multiplier.

You should test the port multiplier or enclosure.  My older 8 bay enclosure with port multiplier will only support up to 6TB drives and behaved badly when I inserted a 10TB drive.  There are also two different standards for port multiplier and some cards only support one standard. 

I second the comment on driver versions.  I had a working solution on Windows 7 but gave up trying to find a driver version that would work with an inexpensive asm1061 or Marvell card in Windows 10 and switched to USB 3.0 which my enclosures also support.