sata controller cards

killerk · 25 Jan 2011 at 20:17

Hi all

After having a look about i have noticed that sata controller cards vary a lot in price can anyone tell me why? Basically i am looking to add another 6 sata connections not in raid to my home server. I dont want to spend much more than 30-40

rpstewart · 25 Jan 2011 at 21:28

You won't get 6 ports on one card for the sort of money you want to spend, all the cheap cards are based on chipsets which support at most 4 ports.

The trouble is even 4 port cards are scarce, there are plenty of 2xSATA, 2xeSATA cards out there but even then most of them can only run 2 ports at a time.

If you do manage to find one be careful of the interface. PCI is limited to 133Mb/s so is best avoided.

AceTK · 25 Jan 2011 at 21:31

Yeah and pci-ex 1x controller cards are restricted in speed too. Ideally you wanna go for a pci-ex x4 or better card to avoid any bus saturation issues

killerk · 25 Jan 2011 at 22:23

will i be able to pick up a pci-e x16 with 4-ports for that money?

rpstewart · 25 Jan 2011 at 22:30

You should be able to get a 4 port card but it certainly won't be PCIe 16x. In fact you won't find any SATA cards with a 16x connector, it's just not required. If you only have a free 16x slot don't worry, you can use any size of PCIe card in a 16x slot.

DragonQ · 25 Jan 2011 at 22:58

Each PCI-E (2.0) lane is 4 Gbps. SATA 6 Gbps is obviously 6 Gbps, USB 3.0 is 5 Gbps.

That'll give you an idea of how ports you can use at once on an expansion card before you get bottlenecked by the PCI-E interface.