Question about adding SATA ports.

I have a home built with an ASUS Z87-A MB. It's current main use is as an HTPC and has four 4TB drives full of media and I need to add another. I have space in the case for several more drives but am using all 6 ports on the MB for those 4 plus an SSD boot and a DVD drive.

Edit to add more specs for this PC (haven't added profiles for secondary PCs yet): 750 watt Thermaltake PS, low watt gen 4 (or 5) i5, airy case with 5 fans and no video card since the Intel HDMI video with that MB and CPU are fine for playing videos.

I could retire the SSD and move Windows to a 5th new media drive. I could replace 4TB drives with larger ones, or I could add SATA ports. The latter seemed preferable but I'm not understanding something about add on PCIe cards.

I see a bunch of low priced X1 cards with various number of ports claiming to provide up to 6GB/sec (SATA III) speeds. But I thought that an X1 card has lower throughput than even one SATA III drive (500 vs 600). I also see several X2 or X4 cards but those all have features I don't care about at prices up to five times as high.

For possible futures, I want at least 2 ports and I want them to have similar performance to SATA III MB ports. I realize I probably don't need that performance to consume media but I like to keep options open, not to mention not wanting future backups to take forever(times 2) instead of just forever. LoL

So, I am thinking I may be misunderstanding if an X1 card can give the same performance as SATA III drives connected to the MB ports otherwise I don't understand why I don't find X2 or X4 cards that just provide 2-4 extra ports and not even more ports or RAID capability, or external ports, etc. that drive the prices way up.

Thanks for any clarification or advice.

Western Digital Ultrastar 14TB DC HC500 7200 RPM SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Data Center Internal Hard Disk Drive - 0F31284 - Newegg.com

There is a 14TB drive that you can use and rid yourself of 3 of your 4TB Drives.

I like this:

Installed 15 of them without a failure after 1 year. The 10TB Drive is the sweet spot.

Seagate Exos X14 ST10000NM0478 - hard drive - 10 TB - SATA 6Gb/s - ST10000NM0478 - Hard Drives - CDW.com

Check around for better pricing! I've seen it for < $250 USD.

FWIW.

Samuria said:

Addin lots of drives you have yo consider power supply and heat

Thanks. I'm overkill on those. 750 watt Thermaltake PS, low watt gen 4 (or 5) i5, airy case with 5 fans and no video card since the Intel HDMI video with that MB and CPU are fine for playing videos. Since I didn't make a profile (yet) for other than my main PC, I apologize for not including that info in the first post. Will update it now....

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Josey Wales said:

Western Digital Ultrastar 14TB DC HC500 7200 RPM SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Data Center Internal Hard Disk Drive - 0F31284 - Newegg.com

There is a 14TB drive that you can use and rid yourself of 3 of your 4TB Drives.

One option was to replace with larger drives.

It scares me to put so many eggs in one basket. Maybe that's not completely logical but its there.

Another reason would be a whole other subject but has to do with my convoluted home grown back up procedure that entails putting media files into folders that correspond to (and contain no more than will fit onto) various drives I use for backups. I back up each 4TB drive to various 1 and 2 TB drives that the 4TB drives replaced as capacity needs grew and larger drives became available. As you can imagine, that is not conducive to consuming the media except via complex Windows "library" structures that I would prefer to NOT have to redo from scratch.

Bet you wish you didn't say anything now, right? LoL

Compumind said:

I like this:

Installed 15 of them without a failure after 1 year. The 10TB Drive is the sweet spot.

Seagate Exos X14 ST10000NM0478 - hard drive - 10 TB - SATA 6Gb/s - ST10000NM0478 - Hard Drives - CDW.com

Check around for better pricing! I've seen it for < $250 USD.

FWIW.

Sure. But $250 to get an extra 6TB is not as appealing to my wallet as $25-$50 for an SATA card and less than $100 for a 4TB.

Plus a failure of a 10TB means a bigger and longer outage. Bigger because its 10 instead or 4, and longer because I don't have another 10 to plug into the last existing SATA port. I would have to acquire a 10TB replacement quickly without waiting for a killer deal and restore 10TB of files instead of 4TB. I have a spare 4TB I keep just for that, plus several 2TBs that could replace a 4TB IF I had 2 extra SATA ports.

If I felt lucky, maybe and if the extra SATA ports don't pan out..............

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SIW2 said:

Have you considered caddies? You could swap in the disks as and when you need them. If you get caddies with switches, they don't need to be powered up all the time.

ORICO Trayless Mobile Rack for 3.5" SATA III HDD into 5.25 Inch PC Bay - Hot Swap for SATA 6 Gbps: Amazon.co.uk: Computers & Accessories

The problem with that is "the fam" would not want to swap drives on this PC in another room from the TV when the movie they want isn't "on-line". Okay, okay, I wouldn't want to do that... or see their sad faces when I returned because they didn't know how. Okay, Okay because I wouldn't want them doing the swap and maybe knocking an IR blaster off or something else I would have to figure out later.

I just want to say that I have had bad luck with other Orico products. And, Orico support has ignored my emails for support.

Sure, Orico products are cheap. However, I'm sure that there are other vendors who make similar products, that even if they cost a bit more, will work well for the long term.

Hoosier Daddy said:

Since I know I do not need full speed for my current primary use (watching videos), I guess I will buy the cheapest (high quality) X2 card I can find (probably ~$50) and pretend all the extra SATA ports and other fluff are acceptable cost wasters. That will give me full SATA III for the 4TB drive I add now and close to full speed when and if I add yet another drive down the road.

Hoosier Daddy,

If you do identify such a card, please post that information for all of us.