No so expensive way to add more Sata ports to my PC for more hard drives ?

[jamieuk23]

Want to add some more hard drives and Rom drives to my PC, but my motherboard only has 4 ports which are all used up.

Can you point me in the direction of a piece of hardware that will add more sata ports "inside" my case + run them at full speed ?

Thanks so much!!

[DoubleTop]

hi, you have a couple of options depending on your motherboard.

For a sata raid controller expansion card, I've used them in the past rather than the onboard as it means that my raid setup is tied to the card, not the board. And if something goes wrong I can pick the raid array drives and the expansion card and move to a new rig.

As to which one, well that depends on the motherboard. There are pci-x2 cards for abour £20 each all the way to super fast controllers running on full pci-e for mega money (think £2000).

I would ask if you are better with more drives, or swapping for higher capacity singles if it's for pure storage. Factor in noise, heat and energy usage and I went for a Western Digital green drive 1Tb. Next step is to make all my storage NAS, I tried esata but it's still a little too new.

What motherboard are you running and with what capacity drives and how many?

DT.