Getting “good” cables on the other hand has been the Bane of my DIY home server existence for over a year now (still unsuccessful, I don’t consider connected devices to just run with PCIe Gen4 a success, I don’t want any PCIe Bus Errors) - for more details refer to this thread:
I think you are living on another planet @aBav.Normie-Pleb cause I can’t for the life of me figure out how that has anthing to do with my question? LOL
These ports don’t come from a SAS controller, you can only choose between SATA/AHCI and PCIe/NVMe.
It’s only the physical connector on the motherboard end that is called “SlimSAS”.*
When using them for SATA 3 just multiply the number of drive ports with 6 Gb/s.
*There sometimes are motherboard variants that have a proper SAS controller chip onboard as an additional feature, but not the model you’ve refered to.