I mentioned, not terribly long ago, a way to get 24 SATA ports relatively cheaply using M.key modules in a carrier board, as long as your motherboard has a spare x16 slot that supports bifurcation. While searching for something else altogether, I noticed someone has put it together as a package (except for the cabling) to make life easy, at a reasonable price: * BTER PCIE X16 Expansion Card, 4 x 32Gbps Full Speed Signal SATA 3.0 DC Power Chip Stable Operation JMB585 Chip PCIE to SATA 6G Adapter Card, Stable Operation Thicker PCB 4 Disk Expansion Card : Amazon.ca: Electronics<https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B09PNMFQNB> * ( https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B09PNMFQNB ) I say “reasonable price” because the cheapest 24-port SATA single-slot HBA I’ve seen that isn’t severely limited by a PCIe x1 interface(!), is this GLOTRENDS thing<https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B0D2J4NF18> for $350, and the name-brand cards with tech support mostly start around $750! -Adam
On 2026-05-22 Adam Thompson via Roundtable wrote:
I mentioned, not terribly long ago, a way to get 24 SATA ports relatively cheaply using M.key modules in a carrier board, as long as your motherboard has a spare x16 slot that supports bifurcation. While searching for something else altogether, I noticed someone has put it together as a package (except for the cabling) to make life easy, at a reasonable price:
Wow. That's pretty nuts. Better let someone else be the guinea pig first though! Why didn't they have this product 10 years ago? :-) And what the heck is "bifurcation" in this context, and how would you know? Would your average consumer board have that? And does this new card trick the system into thinking the SATAs are NVMe?? It is still possible to get 12 SATA on a x8 (or was it x4?) LSI card, and those things are on ebay pretty cheap now. Of course, then you need 2 slots to get 24. I wonder how the performance compares...
Bifurcation is the ability of the motherboard to address an x16 slot as 4 separate logical x4 slots. Higher-end boards often have it, as it's needed to support >1 x NVMe on a 8x/16x carrier card, and that's not an uncommon use case. Bifurcation is also needed for some add-in NICs to do the virtualization thing whose name escapes me at the moment, where the NIC itself presents as multiple PCI devices that can each be passed through to VMs. This does not present the SATA drives as NVMe: there's a SATA controller chip on each M-key PCB, so the OS sees qty 4 of 4xSATA controllers. The 16x carrier board is either completely passive, or has a minimal amount of repeater/signal-stabilizer/etc. circuitry. In very rare cases this sort of card might have a PCIe-PCIe bridge chip. This setup essentially gives each SATA device its own PCIe 1x lane, so it would be nearly impossible to beat, unless the SATA chips on the daughterboards are utter crap, dunno... Oh, you can get 24xSATA on a PCIe x1 card for <$100, I guess that might be useful with WD Greens or something like that... -Adam -----Original Message----- From: Trevor Cordes via Roundtable <roundtable@muug.ca> Sent: Thursday, May 21, 2026 10:22 PM To: roundtable@muug.ca Subject: [RndTbl] Re: cheap high-density 24-port SATA On 2026-05-22 Adam Thompson via Roundtable wrote:
I mentioned, not terribly long ago, a way to get 24 SATA ports relatively cheaply using M.key modules in a carrier board, as long as your motherboard has a spare x16 slot that supports bifurcation. While searching for something else altogether, I noticed someone has put it together as a package (except for the cabling) to make life easy, at a reasonable price:
Wow. That's pretty nuts. Better let someone else be the guinea pig first though! Why didn't they have this product 10 years ago? :-) And what the heck is "bifurcation" in this context, and how would you know? Would your average consumer board have that? And does this new card trick the system into thinking the SATAs are NVMe?? It is still possible to get 12 SATA on a x8 (or was it x4?) LSI card, and those things are on ebay pretty cheap now. Of course, then you need 2 slots to get 24. I wonder how the performance compares... _______________________________________________ Roundtable mailing list -- roundtable@muug.ca To unsubscribe send an email to roundtable-leave@muug.ca
participants (2)
-
Adam Thompson -
Trevor Cordes