Adding more drives

[jmorrow25]

I want to add 6 more hdd to my pc. I only have 6 sata ports on my motherboard, 4 of which are already in use. The obvious solution is a pci card, right? Well, in looking at the cards, i noticed that some also have sas controllers built-in. My question is, if i were to purchase one of the cards with an sas controller, could i also purchase sas drives? The reason i ask is because, iirc, running sas on a system not built for it can be a little tricky. But i can get sas drives significantly cheaper than sata drives. So if it really would be that simple, i would definitely go that route. I just feel like i am overlooking something and i failed to find the answer through my searches... 

[HanZie82]

Putting more drives in your PC then can actually fit already is already a little tricky. So why not go all the way.

[Lady Fitzgerald]

Many SAS add on cards (called HBA cards) can use breakout cables that will split a single SAS port into four SATA cables. An example of a card that can do that is the venerable LSI 9211-8i flashed to IT mode that has two SAS ports that can be split into eight SATA vables yousing two sets of breakout cables. There also is an LSI 9211-4i that will support four more

 

The next question is does you motherboard have enough PCIe lanes to support an HBA cards. Just having a PCIe slot that can physically accommodate an 8 lane card doesn't mean the computer has enough PCIe lanes to support the card, especially if you are running any other cards. some motherboards also share PCIe slot lanes with SATA ports. if you use a SATA port that uses PCI lanes from a PCIe slot, the slot will be disabled when using the port. You would have to check the specs in the manual for your motherboard to be sure.

 

Then there are the questions of if you have enough physical room inside the case to support six more drives and and if the PSU has the power and SATA power connectors to power those drives.

 

A more practical, reliable, and, probably, less expensive option would be to replace your current four drives with much larger ones that will give you the storage space you need or want with the four to six SATA ports you have available. While you are at it, you need to budget for external backup drives (ideally, two per drive in the computer) so, if something should go horribly wrong (remember Murphy's Law), you will not lose your data.

[jmorrow25]

Thank you for the reply. I built the pc a little over a year ago with light gaming and video encoding in mind. It has a ryzen 2700x / asus rog strix x470f mb / 32gb ddr4 3200 / nvidia rtx 2080. It currently has a 500gb nvme samsung 970 evo for os / important apps, 1tb 860 evo for games / temp speedy storage, and 2 5tb hdd for general storage. iirc, the primary m2 slot uses dedicated pci lanes, and it's the one that holds the 970 evo. The secondary m2 slot, which is unoccupied, shares with sata. I will have to check again tonight. 

 

I currently have an external hot swap enclosure that contains 4x10tb seagate exos enterprise drives. One is used frequently and the other 3 are essentially cold storage (but cold storage i need mounted, hence why i don't just swap) . The current enclosure is ok, but all the disks are full. My case has space for 10x3.5" drives, so i was wanting to move the 4 currently in the external enclosure inside plus two more (probably the same drives, maybe 12tb this time). Then i can just add new drives to the external enclosure (runs off usb type c 3.1gen2) as i need more space. I have an 850w psu and i rarely game, so i should have plenty of headroom in the power dept. Money isn't really an issue for the new drives, but it would save me a few hundred purchasing the sas drives, which was the whole reason for my question. But if i have to stick with sata that's fine. I know for cold storage i could go with something cheaper than exos, like an smr drive, but it's worth it for me to have the higher speed when dealing with so much data. I'm not really worried about more external drives and i don't run raid because i can easily restore the data if i need to, it would just take a little more time than re-building an array or backing up from external. So I am stuck with sata it sounds like?