His love of PCs and their components was born out of trying to squeeze every ounce of performance out of the family computer. Tinkering with his own build at age 10 turned into building PCs for friends and family, fostering a passion that would ultimately take shape as a career path.
Besides being the first call for tech support for those close to him, Ty is a computer science student, with his focus being cloud computing and networking. He also competed in semi-pro Counter-Strike for 8 years, making him intimately familiar with everything to do with peripherals.
When it comes to adding storage to a PC, SATA drives make up some of the better options in terms of value for money, but every motherboard generation seems to ship with fewer SATA ports than the last. Even if a board does come with plenty of ports, some of them tend to go dark the moment you populate a certain M.2 slot. If you're a media hoarder or have an overflowing game library, you can hit a storage wall pretty fast, and your on-board SATA ports might not be enough.
One of the best fixes for this, at least in my opinion, isn't a SATA port multiplier or a PCIe to SATA adapter card, but a host bus adapter card. An HBA card is more of a server implement, but it's one of the most flexible ways to add more storage to your PC that's also dirt cheap and battle-tested. I have one in my home server: an LSI 9207-8i that runs eight drives from one PCIe slot, and it can even handle SAS drives that consumer systems normally can't touch. It isn't perfect, but if you're building towards more serious storage habits, it's one of the best ways to add more capacity.
Eight drives from one slot without cutting down the bandwidth
Full-fat SATA speeds
A host bus adapter, or HBA, is one of the simplest kinds of storage controllers you can buy for a PC or server. It sits between the PCIe bus and your drives, and passes them straight through to the operating system with no RAID or caching in between. My LSI 9207-8i built around the SAS2308 controller and has two internal SFF-8087 Mini-SAS connectors. A breakout cable splits each one into four drive connections, so the card supports eight drives with a dedicated 6Gb/s lane each. It’s a PCIe 3.0 x8 card, which is far more bandwidth than eight spinning disks could ever saturate.
Newer SATA expansion cards take a much cheaper route. Some of the most popular options you'll find will usually put six SATA ports behind a PCIe 3.0 x2 link, which leaves roughly 2GB/s across every drive attached. For hard drives that's mostly fine, but then there are other cards that use port multipliers, which push several drives through a single SATA lane.
If you were to buy an HBA, where you install it in your system does matter a bit. On a lot of boards, you'll find that the bottom full-length slot is wired to the chipset and only runs at x2 or x4, often sharing lanes with the on-board SATA ports. This isn't necessarily an issue at x4, but at x2, things can get a bit tight if you're hitting all the drives at once. A quick search on eBay produces plenty of results for under $30, and many of these cards come with the breakout cables you need, which are usually a few bucks on their own.
Some of these HBAs can speak SAS
SAS drives can provide really strong value for your money
Consumer motherboards and SATA cards can only speak SATA, which isn't a problem if you already have SATA drives looking for a home and aren't currently in the market for storage. An LSI HBA like the one I have handles both SAS and SATA, even mixed on the same card.
This can be a huge unlock, because the used enterprise market is full of SAS drives, and since most home builders can't connect them, they usually go for a bit less than comparable SATA models. My ZFS mirror is two 8TB Exos 7E8 SAS drives bought used from ServerPartDeals, and without the HBA, I wouldn't have considered them. If you do go the SAS route, do note that you'll need a specific type of breakout cable: SFF-8482 connectors with a SATA power pass-through, not the plain SATA data plugs that come with most cables.
Server hardware in a consumer desktop isn't as painful to set up as you'd think
It still has its quirks
If you buy an HBA card for home use, look for one flashed with the "IT mode" firmware, which turns the card into a plain host bus adapter with no RAID layer or proprietary stuff in between your drives and the system. It will ensure that the operating system gets handed raw disks, which is what Windows and Linux look for. That includes ZFS, TrueNAS, Unraid, and basically anything else.
These cards are designed for server chassis, and this comes with its own set of annoyances and troubleshooting challenges. Keeping these cards cool in a desktop system usually requires a dedicated fan on the heatsink, as a hot HBA can drop drives. I've ziptied a small Noctua fan onto mine, which keeps it cool enough for 24/7 operation.
Then there's compatibility: LSI controllers can communicate over the SMBus, which some consumer motherboards also use for memory detection, and that conflict can stop a system from completing POST. My Z170-E motherboard needed the well-known fix of covering pins B5 and B6 on the card’s edge connector with tape before it would cooperate, and that took many hours of troubleshooting to figure out.
There are also additional power-related consequences. Users who’ve checked report that the 9207-8i doesn’t support PCIe link power management, which can keep the whole system out of deep idle states even with every drive spun down, so that's something to look out for on your power bill.
HBAs aren't for everyone, but they're a cost-effective way to scale up
For someone who just wants two to four more SATA drives in a gaming PC, a new ASM1166 card is a perfectly acceptable purchase, especially if playing with electrical tape and hours of troubleshooting doesn't sound fun. If you're looking to seriously scale up your storage and SAS drive prices look attractive, an HBA is the perfect way to add some capacity to your system, and an LSI card like mine will often cost a lot less than a consumer SATA card.