Need more SATA ports ?

[verystrengt]

I'm currently running my NAS on a system with a http://ark.intel.com/nl/products/63246/Intel-Desktop-Board-DZ77SL-50K DS77SL-50K motherboard, my case and psu still have plenty of space and power left but the 5 sata ports are already used.
I've seen that there are Raid controllers that I can plug into pcie ports but I just need more ports, the raid is done in software with linux.

Does anyone know what brand or model I should get from amazon.de or another BE shop?

Thanks for any help

[camerongray]

What you are looking for is a Host Bus Adapter - A card that will provide you with additional SATA ports but without adding additional RAID functionality.  You can get pretty cheap ones for around €30 which use low end chipsets from the likes of Marvell.  They would probably do the job but tend to not be great in terms of performance/reliability - They will work but I personally wouldn't trust them in anything mission critical.

Personally, for a server I'd be looking for a proper server grade HBA from a recognised company like LSI, Adaptec or HighPoint. However, be warned that these cards aren't cheap, you may want to look to see what you can find used on places like eBay.

[verystrengt]

What you are looking for is a Host Bus Adapter - A card that will provide you with additional SATA ports but without adding additional RAID functionality.  You can get pretty cheap ones for around €30 which use low end chipsets from the likes of Marvell.  They would probably do the job but tend to not be great in terms of performance/reliability - They will work but I personally wouldn't trust them in anything mission critical.

Personally, for a server I'd be looking for a proper server grade HBA from a recognised company like LSI, Adaptec or HighPoint. However, be warned that these cards aren't cheap, you may want to look to see what you can find used on places like eBay.

Most of the Adaptec cards that are low cost seem to be raid controllers like the aar-2610sa/64mb but I'm guessing the pci bandwidth is way to low for what I'm trying to achieve (100MB/disk)?
There is also this consumer brand DeLOCK that offers 10 ports for 100€ and with 1GB bandwidth(pcie 2.0 x2) http://www.delock.de/produkte/F_322_SATA---eSATA_89384/merkmale.html?setLanguage=en

This server offers international services to family and friends so it's not something I would call "mission criticial"

[camerongray]

You definitely want a card that's PCI-E.  That Delock one would work but it's still very much a basic SATA controller so I can't vouch for the reliability.  LSI definitely do some decent looking PCI-E HBAs for not too much money on the used market.  Many cards will offer some type of RAID functionaliy but look at the specs, as long as it has a "JBOD" or "HBA" mode, you can use it to pass the drives directly through to your OS.

If your card only supports RAID, you can technically just create a bunch of RAID 0 arrays where each array contains a single disk to pass each drive through to the OS and then RAID them in software.  This would work although it's not ideal as the abstraction created by the RAID controller can make things like monitoring drive health a bit more difficult than it would be with a proper HBA.

You'll probably find that decent, high end cards will use a miniSAS connector rather than individual SATA connectors as shown below.  This is fine, you can fairly easily find an appropriate cable to break this out into individual SATA connectors.

[verystrengt]

You definitely want a card that's PCI-E.  That Delock one would work but it's still very much a basic SATA controller so I can't vouch for the reliability.  LSI definitely do some decent looking PCI-E HBAs for not too much money on the used market.  Many cards will offer some type of RAID functionaliy but look at the specs, as long as it has a "JBOD" or "HBA" mode, you can use it to pass the drives directly through to your OS.

If your card only supports RAID, you can technically just create a bunch of RAID 0 arrays where each array contains a single disk to pass each drive through to the OS and then RAID them in software.  This would work although it's not ideal as the abstraction created by the RAID controller can make things like monitoring drive health a bit more difficult than it would be with a proper HBA.

You'll probably find that decent, high end cards will use a miniSAS connector rather than individual SATA connectors as shown below.  This is fine, you can fairly easily find an appropriate cable to break this out into individual SATA connectors.

I think I found something fitting but I'm not sure it's compatible with my motherboard, it requires x8 lane PCI Express® 3.0

It's this one https://www.broadcom.com/products/storage/raid-controllers/megaraid-sas-9341-4i#specifications , as you said it's a raid card but it supports jbod up to 64 disks at 12Gb

Seems like a good deal for 50€?

[camerongray]

Looks good assuming you can find the appropriate cable, some controllers will expect you to connect them to some sort of hotswap backplane in a server case in order to use all of the drives so unless you can find a cable from the Controller's "SFF8643" that has more than 4 SATA connectors, you may be a bit limited.  A controller with 2 or more of the high density MiniSAS ports would probably be easier since you'd be able to use 2 separate cables.

[verystrengt]

Thank you for all your help camerongray, I would have never figured this out on my own, 4 ports are enough for me at the moment to be honest but having the option to add a backplane is something I might look into later on.