Help purchasing a card to expand my SATA ports for extra HDDs

[Visual Hudson]

I've run out of SATA ports on my motherboard and need to add more HDD space. I've recently bought another 4TB WD Black HDD but as of right now have no way of connecting it to my computer. I'm getting a bit confused when trying to find the best PCIe card to buy so that I can throw this drive in my rig. 

 

I'm not looking at using RAID at the moment, so that's not a priority. It's something I may consider later down the road, but as of right now that's not what I'm looking for.

 

I'd prefer as many SATA 3 6GB/s ports as possible, as I imagine that I'll be needing to purchase more HDDs in the future. I've seen them with 2, 4 and more ports. But surely the read / write speeds will slow the more drives you have running off of one card? Or am I totally wrong? 

 

I'm from the UK if anyone can direct me towards any particular models / good deals?

 

Sorry if this is posted in the wrong forum. I wasn't sure if it should go here or in the Servers & NAS sub-forum. 

[Uptivuptiz]

I have found this. I'm not sure if you'll run in to bottleneck with this. Since you aren't running a raid setup it shouldn't be a problem since you aren't hitting mutible disks at the same time.

 

[Visual Hudson]

I've seen those on Amazon, but I'm dubious because there's thirteen different models all listed with the same set of reviews and Q&As, so you don't really know how good the one you choose to buy actually is. If that makes sense?

 

They're also like no-name brands so who knows what you're going to get.

 

I'm not against having a card that would allow to RAID later down the line, so if that was a feature that could be handy, but as I say it's certainly not a priority right now. I just need to get this HDD into my case! haha

[Uptivuptiz]

3 minutes ago, Visual Hudson said:

I've seen those on Amazon, but I'm dubious because there's thirteen different models all listed with the same set of reviews and Q&As, so you don't really know how good the one you choose to buy actually is. If that makes sense?

 

They're also like no-name brands so who knows what you're going to get.

 

I'm not against having a card that would allow to RAID later down the line, so if that was a feature that could be handy, but as I say it's certainly not a priority right now. I just need to get this HDD into my case! haha

In that case I'll search some more and come back later!  

[Visual Hudson]

Awesome, thanks for all your help! 

 

I knew this would be the place to come for this kind of help

[Uptivuptiz]

1 minute ago, Visual Hudson said:

Awesome, thanks for all your help! 

 

I knew this would be the place to come for this kind of help

Always happy to help!  

[Uptivuptiz]

Ok, so I searched for a bit... It turns out it's really hard to be sure that the product is quality. I think the card that i found before is OK or something like it. Sorry I couldn't do better. 

[Visual Hudson]

Am I correct in thinking that the card you linked before wouldn't do RAID if I later wanted it too? 

 

If I want to do RAID later on, do I need to buy a RAID card? If I did buy a RAID card, can I choose to not use RAID until I later wanted to and just use it in the mean time as a PCIe SATA card?

[Uptivuptiz]

On 1/27/2018 at 10:20 AM, Visual Hudson said:

Am I correct in thinking that the card you linked before wouldn't do RAID if I later wanted it too? 

 

If I want to do RAID later on, do I need to buy a RAID card? If I did buy a RAID card, can I choose to not use RAID until I later wanted to and just use it in the mean time as a PCIe SATA card?

Sorry for the late response. This spec sheet says it can do software RAID so your should be able to do RAID without a additional card. 

[gamerking]

i would just get a SATA HBA card . alot of the ones ive looked at when i was looking to get a PCI card arnt very good unless you willing to spend alot or go with SAS gear from servers. also with a HBA if the card dies you just get another or attach the drives back to the pc and they work again since its just passing everything attached to it to the cpu to figure out what to do .