The original post: /r/datahoarder by /u/thekeym4ster on 2024-12-05 07:33:25.

I have filled up all of my 8 bays and mobo SATA ports, yet I need to add some more storage. To maximize my capacity, the plan is to buy a couple 5.25 to 3.5 inch bay adapters and a SATA card because I do not use RAID and this is not for a NAS, but merely to add more un-backed up storage. However, I have come across quite a few posts in the past couple of days talking about this or that issue with SATA expansion cards and all of this is new to me, so I need a little help figuring out how to pick the right SATA expansion card to avoid issues. Below are my specs:

Only 2 extra ports are needed because that is all that my case supports and I plan to keep everything internal. Also, I suspect a 2-port SATA expansion card would be less expensive than a card with more ports? I have looked on Amazon, but most seem to be PCI-E version 2.0 and my mobo supports version 4.0, so… Are PCI-E version 4.0 SATA expansion cards even a thing? Using a 2.0 will limit the bandwidth, so I am assuming this would limit the read and write speeds of drives connected to the card? Further, to avoid issues, other Redditors have suggested avoiding port-multiplying cards (i.e. the card’s chipset should not have more ports than the number of lanes that the chipset supports), yet they might have been referring to HBA SAS cards? With my setup, I am able to support a x4 card, so I suspect a PCI-E version 4.0 SATA III expansion card with 2 ports that has a chipset to support 2 ports and uses 4 lanes would be ideal, but does such a thing exist? Am I just looking in the wrong place?

Picking a SATA expansion card is the last piece of the puzzle that I need to figure out, so any help would be greatly appreciated!