I've recently been looking into getting a PCIe-SATA expansion card, otherwise known as a port multiplier because I no longer have any free SATA ports on my system, but I'm confused about how exactly these cards work and how I can determine whether my PC will support them. This is an answer to a duplicate of this question, where you use a RAID enclosure like this that takes a single SATA input but supports two drives, and run it as RAID 0 so it's a striped drive and you get all the drive space. This solution should offer pretty good speed, especially if you have HDDs that benefit from RAID 0. The big limitation here is that, even though you have different drives, they get viewed as one by the RAID, so you have to work against that. Definitely not hot-swap friendly. While they may be inexpensive, they are inefficient and produce low scores on the performance and compatibility board. Unless you’re on a tight budget, we do not recommend that you add SATA ports to motherboard via these expansion cards.

In the last year or two, we've had a resurgence of users asking about SATA Port Multipliers and cheap SATA controllers. SATA ports are mainly for adding more storage drives to your computer. Most motherboards come with two to six SATA ports.I think the ASM1064 should be good enough though in terms of performance, since the goal is not to write to each disks with its maximum speed. I have an 8 bay thunderbolt 3 enclosure attached which exposes 2 JMB585 based controllers which host 4x WD RED 2TB disks each. The SATA to USB adapter cable will help you to connect the external hard drive to your PC. If you are looking for this type of adapter cable, then go for the SABRENT USB to SATA adapter cable.

You'll need to pay attention to SAS connection type though since there are many. I mostly see SFF-8484, SFF-8482, and SFF-8087 being used for this. Everything I'm linking to here is SFF-8087. If you don't have a SAS port, you can get a PCIe to SAS adapter (supports up to 7 SATA). Although this is an extra piece vs. going directly from PCIe to SATA, it gives you more flexibility. Example of relatively high performance (1.6 GB/s) using this configuration. Supposedly, the speed for the adapter shown below is 715 MB/s Read (Seq,256K,Q10) for 3 drives (1 HDD + 2 SSDs in RAID HyperDuo (Safe Mode), so SSD is primary access). A SATA Port Multiplier is possibly the cheapest option, and effectively shares the bandwidth from a single upstream SATA port. These are not always supported and I would generally discourage using them unless absolutely necessary (i.e. the other options are unsuitable). Unless you can find documentation (often in the SATA controller's spec sheet) and preferably also empirical evidence of support, you're better off avoiding port multipliers. These use (extend) the onboard controller. Here's a graphic detailing what I've found. This diagram is purely from a hardware adapter perspective, ignoring controller limitations. So, for instance, you can physically daisy chain a PCIe x1 port indefinitely (notice the loop), but this ignores controller, speed, and power limitations. Second example, I don't think you can adapt a PCIe port to 4 SATA and port multiply and RAID multiply each from there (1PCIe x (4SATA/1PCIe) x 5SATA x 2SATA = 40 SATA). These require special cables called SAS to SATA cables. The LSI Logic Controller Card LSI00301 above can support 8 SATA ports. Hence here you will find two SAS-4 SATA ports cables.It uses only an x1 connecter and conforms to the PCIe v3.0 protocol. Hence, it has a maximum throughput of 985 MB/s– the theoretical max throughput of a single PCIe v3.0 lane. In reality, the throughput rate is lower than this. But for simplicity’s sake, we will take 985 MB/s for this example. Aiming to mostly replicate the build from @Stux (with some mods, hopefully around about as good as that link) Typically, Serial ATA (SATA) connectivity consists of a single drive connected to a single controller port via a single cable. The maximum number of drives in an array is predicated on the controller’s port count. The SATA Port Multiplier (SATA PM) permits a change to that point-to-point relationship via port multiplication technology. Port multipliers allow easy, cost-effective storage expansion and enable the aggregation of the performance of multiple drives as well.

SATA expansion cards come with different numbers of connectors, including x8, x4, and even x1. Each of the numbers after the ‘X’ refers to the number of PCIe lanes the expansion card will occupy. This means that an expansion card with an x4 connector will occupy four lanes, an x1 will occupy one, and so on. When using pci passthrogh for the controllers to the VM, the controllers would drop the disks and the console would spam with CAM timeouts and detachment messages. If you’re building a normal PC you want to use at home, two SATA ports should be enough. But if your build is like a NAS PC that requires multiple storage devices, then you’ll n eed extra SATA ports depending on your storage needs. How To Add More SATA Ports A SATA hub port multiplier is one of the cheapest ways to add more SATA ports to your computer. This device allows you to turn one SATA port into a host that multiplies your ports. It is inexpensive and one of the common methods to utilize if and when you need more ports for your budget build. But, if you have an old motherboard that has a limited number of SATA ports, then you can increase the number of SATA ports on your motherboard.As far as i know the JMB585 ist a true PCIgen3x2 Controller with 5x individual SATA ports which in turn support SATA port miltipliers as the 575 again supporting up to 25 ports in total. Support would be subject to the expansion card's SATA controller, not the motherboard's SATA controller, any limitation of the motherboard's SATA controller would not be applicable to the expansion card. These extension cards are really helpful for those who require higher storage, like (Video editors and gamers, etc.).

Jan 31 17:15:35 nightowl kernel: [ 222.035088] ata1.00: 7814037168 sectors, multi 16: LBA48 NCQ (depth 32), AA SATA controllers and SATA Port Multipliers are some of the cheapest hardware, designed to make a number of hard drives accessible to Windows. A port multiplier takes a single port of a SATA controller and multiplexes it between several drives.I've recently been looking into getting a PCIe to SATA expansion card, which I think is otherwise known as a port multiplier (which was the first result in Google when I searched for such an adapter). I need one because I no longer have any free SATA ports on my system, but I'm confused about how exactly these cards work and how I can determine whether my PC will support them. This article covered different solutions for how to add more SATA ports to the motherboard. Essentially, there are many solutions. The last important factor to consider when choosing a SATA expansion card for additional SATA ports is whether you want one with a built-in hardware RAID controller or not. SATA expansion cards with RAID controllers tend to be expensive than those without them. They also use more bandwidth and are often utilized by professionals and NAS builders. Conclusion One solution to this, would be to use a Sata Host Bus Adapter, which will expand your possible number of drives. There are many types of these, ranging from 2 ports upwards 16 on a single 8 lane card.