Run out of Sata3 Ports

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ezzy_s

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Sep 1, 2014
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I use my old PC as a home file server / plex media server have run out of SATA Ports on my motherboard (currently have 4 hdd, 1 ssd and 1 DVD drive attached)

Any recommendations on how to increase the number of SATA ports available to me?

Or should I start to be looking at a different set up? I do not have anything set up in raid.
 
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Rookie_MIB

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Jul 27, 2013
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Agreed with the PCIe -> Sata adapter. A few things to note:

1) Make sure it supports drives larger than 2.2TB. Some slightly older cards that are on eBay only support up to 2TB. If you're only using 2TB drives then it's not a problem, but if you are, then it can be an issue.
2) Some people think that the PCIe x1 cards aren't good enough, that you have to have a PCIe x4 or x8 card otherwise you'll have bottlenecks. One lane of PCIe 3.0 has 1.0 GB/sec of bandwidth. That's gigabytes/sec. Your average HDD (I'm assuming you're not using SSDs) can read/write at maybe 150-200MB/sec, so unless you have more than 5 HDDs hooked up to a PCIe x1 (which you won't find - they're all maxed out at 4 SATA ports unless you go with a x8 server style RAID card) you won't hit a bottleneck.
3) Decide if you a hardware RAID - some of the cards just provide the SATA interface, some are integrated with RAID. I guess if you want to option down the road you can get one with RAID and just not use it. Then if you change your mind just change some settings.
 
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Sakkura

Sakkura

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Aug 22, 2011
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Well, your numbers are correct, but there are some potential problems with the assumptions.

Not all PCIe SATA controller cards are PCIe 3.0. PCIe 2.0 is still pretty common, and has half the bandwidth. And then the card may have multiple SATA ports. Two HDDs on a PCIe 2.0 x1 card should still be okay, but not with an SSD in the mix, nor with more than 2 drives.
 
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Rookie_MIB

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Ah - yes, that's very true. If the card is v2.0 then the bandwidth is limited to 500MB/sec for a x1 card. But - the main thing to remember is the USAGE scenario. If this was a video editing machine and he hung four HDDs off the x1 v2.0 card, and everything was being maxed out, then yes, it would bottleneck for sure (well, only a little as 150MB x 4 = 600MB/sec vs 500MB sec for x1 - he'd lose about 100MB sec overall bandwidth).

His main usage for the machine though is as a MEDIA SERVER. That means the maximum throughput he'll be capable of putting through is... 1Gbit/sec, or 125MB/sec. That's the maximum he can go in or out of his machine unless he has multiple NICs or a 10Gbit network (HIGHLY unlikely on the 10Gbit!!). Even with multiple NICs and teaming it's unlikely that he'll be combining more than two NICs.

So, even in this particular case, with a x1 v2.0 SATA card, he still wouldn't be bottlenecked by the SATA card itself, his network is the limiting factor. :)
 
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