What's the most SATA ports I can get from a PCIE adapter?

[Natsoup]

I'd like to install a PCIE to SATA adapter but I'm not familiar with the hardware. What's the max I could get out of a PCIE 8x slot or lower?

[PeachyUwUSenpai]

what version of sata I II III?

[79wjd]

For what use and at what price point? 

 

The Syba SI-PEX 40064 (with four ports) was the best price/port that I found when I looked a couple years ago. 

[Natsoup]

II or III are both fine

Just now, Alaradia said:

what version of sata I II III?

 

[PeachyUwUSenpai]

do you just want straight sata or is sas then using a sata splitter fine?

[Natsoup]

Just now, djdwosk97 said:

For what use and at what price point? 

 

The Syba SI-PEX 40064 (with four ports) was the best price/port that I found when I looked a couple years ago. 

Price point isn't a huge concern, I'm more in planning right now. This would be to collect smaller drives as my work is throwing out a lot of small 128gb hdds and they work just fine.

[dalekphalm]

1 minute ago, Natsoup said:

II or III are both fine

 

Depending on your needs, a native SATA Card will often top out at 4 ports, but you can find ones that go higher.

 

If you get a SAS HBA (SAS can run SATA drives using an adapter cable), you can go as high as you want, realistically. 16-port cards, I've seen higher even (though the prices usually make it cheaper to buy multiple smaller cards).

[Natsoup]

1 minute ago, Alaradia said:

or is sas then using a sata splitter fine?

I don't understand what you're saying here.

[Natsoup]

1 minute ago, dalekphalm said:

Depending on your needs, a native SATA Card will often top out at 4 ports, but you can find ones that go higher.

 

If you get a SAS HBA (SAS can run SATA drives using an adapter cable), you can go as high as you want, realistically. 16-port cards, I've seen higher even (though the prices usually make it cheaper to buy multiple smaller cards).

Thanks. I'll poke around

[PeachyUwUSenpai]

1 minute ago, Natsoup said:

I don't understand what you're saying here.

 this may help explain it 

[79wjd]

3 minutes ago, Natsoup said:

Price point isn't a huge concern, I'm more in planning right now. This would be to collect smaller drives as my work is throwing out a lot of small 128gb hdds and they work just fine.

It may be worthwhile to consider power consumption depending on what you plan on doing and how many drives you're talking about. 

 

For example, if you wanted to use them to build a NAS and you wanted 2tb, then you could just buy a 2tb NAS for like $70~ that would cost about $15/year to run. But 15 128gb drives would cost like $150/year to run. 

[mariushm]

Most SATA controller ICs do 2, 4 or 8 sata ports.  2 port cards are usually on pci-e x1 , 4 port ones are usually on pci-e x1 or x4 , the ones with 8 sata ports are usually on pci-e x8

 

Basically x1 is 500 MB/s in both directions for pci-e v2.0 and around 980 MB/s in both directions for pci-e v3.0

 

Up to 8 sata ports, you'll usually find plain sata connectors.

 

There are some controllers that have 12 or 16 ports, but they usually come with 3-4 SAS connectors and you need to buy 1-to-4 cables which convert one SAS connector to 4 SATA cables.

 

You could just go on a site like Newegg and use the filters to see what you want .. start from HERE i set some defaults for you, just choose the number of ports and their type and continue filtering.

[Electronics Wizardy]

19 minutes ago, Natsoup said:

I'd like to install a PCIE to SATA adapter but I'm not familiar with the hardware. What's the max I could get out of a PCIE 8x slot or lower?

What are you tring to do?

 

You can technically get thousands with sas expanders and a sas hba(sata drives work fine in sas controllers). 

[mariushm]

Also to add... SOME but not all SATA controller chips support port multipliers. Basically, they're some special chips which convert ONE sata into FIVE sata.

So basically, the 600 MB/s that a single SATA cable can carry is shared by 5 hard drives .. each hard drive talks to the port multiplier chip at 600 MB/s but the port multiplier chip talks to the system through a single 600 MB/s connection. Think of it like a network switch.

 

Here's an example of such a port multiplier thing, which converts  ONE sata connector into 16 connectors : https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA98C40E1251&cm_re=port_multiplier-_-16-115-157-_-Product

- all those 16 hard drives share the 300 MB/s (it's sata 2 maximum) connection to the pc so you won't get good speeds if you write or read from all drives at same time.  It's basically good for something like storing movies and music in your house and playing a few files at a time from a computer with this card.

 

edit: actually i read the description, because something smelled fishy to me... the thing i linked above only works with another highpoint sata card in reality, which has 4 sata ports... those 4 sata ports go in the input connector of this card, and each of those sata connections is converted into 4 ports... so basically 4 sata ports are converted into 16 ports.

 

[Mira Yurizaki]

Theoretically you could have an infinite amount of SATA ports. The thing you have to worry about is how much total data you're trying to stuff down the pipe at once. This is something that usually only servers and such worry about.

[mariushm]

In theory yes, in practice no.

 

If my memory is correct, you can have up to 127 ports per controller and up to 15 ports per port multiplier ( for example 8 sata cables -> 8 port multipliers  - > 8 x 15 = 120 sata ports ... total  127 sata ports - n x port multipliers you used, because each port multiplier receives its own unique id as well )

then you can have multiple controllers in your pc ... but generally the pci-e lanes are limited and you can't just use them willy nilly.

 

For example, even with the one of the friendliest architecture that I know of  when it comes to pci-e lanes, the AMD EPYC... these processors have 128 pci-e lanes from the cpu, arranged in 8 x x16 and these x16 "segments" can be split to 8 devices (for example 1x16 or 2x8 or 1x8+2x4 or 1x8+1x4+4x1 or whatever, any combination that makes 8 devices)

So you'd have maybe 8 x 8 sata controllers connected directly to pci-e lanes from cpu, and then you may have additional pci-e lanes coming from some chipset and the internal sata ports of the cpu.