Looking forward to a “near” future NAS build, and then further forward to the potential need/desire to add more drives to expand it, I’m faced with the reality of the re-used consumer hardware I plan to build it on will quickly run out of SATA ports (when did 4 become more or less the standard, didn’t 10 used to be pretty common?).
Assuming it would be a simple matter of pci-e card I searched newegg, and was surprised to find not very many listed, and NONE from a brand I have heard of. Also wildly varying prices and amounts of ports, all of which threw up red flags for me. And then I started to realize I don’t know how many SATA ports pci-e cards SHOULD be able to break out to and if the high port count cards are doing it like a “hub” type thing that would mean they can’t operate simultaneously.
Some googling sort of suggested that it’s just a matter of total bandwidth, but that doesn’t “feel” right to me. I would have thought the pci-e lane arrangement matters at least somewhat, and it isn’t as simple as the total bandwidth can be freely and dynamically distributed amongst all the drives. But if it really IS that simple, I probably don’t need to be worrying about this at all for a personal NAS/media drive. The most I care about performance is if it can play back high quality video. But I do want to avoid having a setup that steps on its own toes if it physically can’t access a drive because another one on the same PCI slot is reading/writing. Seems like that could make a striped NAS absolutely choke.
Beyond that concern, it’s a matter of reputable manufacturers. Like I said, I found nothing from anyone I had ever heard of before.
The best way to add sata ports is a second hand raid cart formatted into “IT”/HBA mode. LSI SAS 9211-8i (8 internal) cards are quite popular for this, with some miniSAS → SATA cables. Though flashing them to IT mode can be interesting, so read some tutorials.
A lot of the cheap sata cards you find on amazon can be of dubious quality. There are good cards out there, and I’d be searching for technical reviews on here and other websites. (Maybe checkout startech, some of their stuff is decent). I’d say the main concern is reliability.
These cards use SATA controllers to add SATA ports, and each controller gives you a certain number of SATA ports. Theoretically a card could have infinite SATA ports. The number of usable ports is limited more by PCIe bandwidth than anything.
Also FYI you can find a lot of “NAS” motherboards on aliexpress. These might serve as an alternative for getting enough SATA ports.
What you want is called an HBA, or Host Bus Adapter card. It’s essentially a RAID Controller card with out the RAID Controller, or what was suggested in the first comment.
I use a bunch of these, they are relatively affordable, even with the cables that are needed.
But, be aware, ones with the LSI2008 chipset, are aging, and some systems (Looking at You, RedHat…) may phase them out.
IIRC, RedHat went back on their decision, but just food for thought- cheap cards for now, won;t be saving much money if you need to buy more expensive ones later.
I have a bunch of no-name 4- port SATA addin cards, which run fine, on a PCIe3x2 slot, but they are not as good as the SAS cards.
I don’t have any particular brand, but presume there are StarTech versions, that are usually relatively inexpensive…
something like this, but not sure on pricing.
Looks about 3X more expensive as the kind of unit I’ve been using, but much newer
I’ve been using this card, it works. With PCIe 3 x 4 it has just under 4GB/s bandwidth which is more than enough for even 6 SATA SSDs going at full bore at the same time ( 6 x ~550MB/s ≈ 3.3GB/s).
item 1005004996370406 on AliExpress (can’t post links).
You can find these on eBay/Amazon pre-flashed to IT mode. SAS HBAs are nice because retired Enterprise SAS drives tend to be much cheaper than equivalent capacity SATA models.
The cheap/no-name PCIe-to-SATA can be hit-and-miss and better to check what controller they use. Some are pretty good with individual SATA ports for each connector, some are crappy designs daisy-chaining a 2-port SATA-PCIe gen 2x1 controller with SATA expanders like JMB575, which means not only higher latencies, but also shared SATA bandwidths, not only PCIe.
I have one such card as a fallback (was misadvertised, can’t find the details now and the product has been removed from AliExpress) and went with a proper HBA instead.
One thing I’ll add about HBAs though, they tend to get toastier than simple ASMedia chips. More heat = more power wasted. Something to keep in mind (you might need to force more air over a “proper” HBA than over an ASM1166. I’ve also never heard about any problems with sleep with the ASMedia chips. With HBAs on the other hand…
Alright nice. My review is:
5 stars
“Great price, there’s no noticeable additional power use from it, drives get detected perfectly fine and behave the same as if they were connected to my motherboard.”
