I found this controller which uses pcie 3 x8 to give me 24 sata ports. However the bandwidth wouldn’t be quite enough.
ther is also another way and that is to use this module in conjunction with those high speed m.2 pcie controllers that have 4x m.2 ports to get a totall of 6x SATA ports.
However the second option is kind of odd and I don’t think if it will actually work.
Alternatively, try the M.2 route:
- get one of these: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005003091877961.html
- populate each slot with these: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005005653706057.html
- setup the PCIe slot with 4x4x4x4x bifurcation
- done
If you plan to run 24 SATA HDDs, then x8 PCIe 3.0 is more than sufficient to run them all at max speed. if you plan to fully populate with SSDs that might be a different story.
I think @aBav.Normie-Pleb did something similar with a bunch of ASM1166s.
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Yes, this should work just fine.
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You need a motherboard that can enable PCIe Bifurcation x4-x4-x4-x4 for 16 Lanes.
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You can either use a single PCIe x16-to-4x-M.2 Adapter or two PCIe x8-to-2xM.2 Adapters (Assuming an AMD AM4 or AM5 system).
I recently made one with two ASM1166 M.2 SATA HBAs, so far 0 issues. Make sure to update to the latest firmware version:
If you only need SATA, not SAS or NVMe features I’d prefer that solution over every current Broadcom HBA (Broadcom acquired what was LSI in the past) since I tend to encounter massive driver and firmware issues with Broadcom products.
BUT:
This would make the whole endeavor useless: Those M.2-to-SATA HBAs only have a PCIe Gen3 x2 interface each, meaning with 4 pieces you still end up with only PCIe Gen3 x8 bandwidth.
To my knowledge there currently aren’t any M.2-to-SATA HBAs that use a Gen3 x4 or Gen4 x2 PCIe Interface.
The cheap, jank, solution mentionned above will work great.
If you don’t want to go this route, Broadcom make the 9305 24i and 9600 24i : High-port x8, PCIe 4.0 HBA 9600-24i Tri-Mode Storage Adapter
Ya, PCI-E gen 3 x8 lane slot has 8GB/s bandwidth. That is plenty for 24 hard drives, and really wont cap sata SSDs that much either.
I want to maximize the bandwith I can get from SATA 3 speed SSDs.
So, the above suggestion doesn’t actually work for what you’re asking for. The ASM controller in question is, in the first place, PCIE 3.0 1x or 2x, not 4x. The 6 ports on it are 36Gb/s total, over 16Gb/s PCIE bandwidth per M.2, totaling 64Gb/s for 4 cards, requiring a 16x slot with full bifurcation to get you even that far.
In other words, it doesn’t actually get you there. It’s going to be the same total bandwidth as the opening product, just with more parts, and with more restrictive port configurations and less compatibility.
You’re looking for 144Gb/s bandwidth to do 24 SATA 6Gb/s at full speed, so even PCIE 3.0 16x or PCIE 4.0 8x just won’t get you there.
https://www.newegg.com/p/2NS-00HY-00014
Is this perhaps what you’re looking for? It advertises about ~240Gb/s, which is enough for 192Gb/s that the 32i interface should get you.
Not sure if it can be configured to IT mode/not be raid.
Yes, I just want something that uses the full bandwidth of a PCIe 4.0 x16. But $3k is too much, guess I should look for a second hand raid card. This seems to be a reliable solution
I’m on the lookout for something similar. Not that I am going to need 24 ports (yet), but it kindof blows my mind that there don’t seem to be commodity expansion cards that turn pci-e slots into an equivalent amount of SATA ports from any brand I’ve ever heard of before. I had assumed (before I tried it) that I could just go to newegg, search “sata expansion card” and easily find something I could trust without further research.
It’s niche, in pro-sumer land, let alone consumer land.
4/6 sata ports are common, but more is… Less so.
Is it though? I don’t think wanting to add a lot of drives is that much of a pro-sumer thing personally. Especially with how mainstream the idea of a NAS has become. Building one yourself instead of one of those appliances isn’t THAT much of a stretch, and the number of sata ports included on motherboards seems to be shrinking, not growing. Maybe my memory is off, but I feel like I remember 10 ports not being uncommon back in the day. The dinosaur I’m building on has 8 (though 4 of them are gen 2 only). Hell even the number of pci-e slots seems to be dwindling. Used to be you could count on every space on the the motherboard containing at least a 1x slot, with 2-4 of them being 16x. Now even some of the stupid expensive motherboards have as little as TWO.
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On board ports are deffo being replaced with M.2 slots
There are places selling HBA’s (I’m a fan or the Art Of Server ebay store&YT channel) and prosumer YT channels like L1T and LTS and even to a very small degree LTT
But even just the second hand market is not Huge considering how much is cast off by enterprise, which works in our favour for prices, but less so for drivers
OK, the best SATA III SSDs max out around 550 Mbytes/sec ~= 4.4 Gbps, not 6 Gbps.
There are PLENTY in the enterprise space for SAS - which is just a superset of SATA (i.e. all SATA drives will work with SAS, but not vice versa).
And plenty of castoffs one or two generations older for quite cheap that work just fine.
Or hey, even this brand new, current 9600-24i for $200-ish!
8 lanes of PCIe 4.0 = 128 Gbps
24 SATA 6 Gbps ports = 144 Gbps theoretical.
A good match!
A near perfect match, I’d say. I haven’t seen any SATA SSD ever get close to 600 MB/s. And the boat has long sailed for any further improvements to SATA.
Guys, don’t forget that SATA (not SAS) is only half-duplex, meaning the ca. 570 MB/s max transfer speed per SATA device is when only performing read OR write operations.
As soon as mixed loads enter the picture due to SATA the transfer speeds are practically cut in half.
PCIe on the other hand is full-duplex, meaning mixed read or write operations don’t impact each other.
Long story short: If you are not constantly using just sequential reads or writes with SATA drives the PCIe interface of a SATA HBA chipset might even be less of an issue.
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- SATA uses 8/10 encoding, so while signal bw is 6Gb/s, data bw is 4.8Gb/s or 600MB/s:
Third-generation SATA interfaces run with a native transfer rate of 6.0 Gbit/s; taking 8b/10b encoding into account, the maximum uncoded transfer rate is 4.8 Gbit/s (600 MB/s). The theoretical burst throughput of SATA 6.0 Gbit/s is double that of SATA revision 2.0. It is backward compatible with earlier SATA implementations.
- Why the hell is SATA half-duplex if it has dedicated TX and RX pairs? Alternatively, why does it have dedicated TX and RX pairs if it’s only half-duplex?
To remain compatible with PATA, and by transitive property, even older standards than that.