Reddit mentions of I/O Crest 4 Port SATA III PCI-e 2.0 x2 Non RAID Hard Drive Controller Card Marvell 9235 Chipset

Depends on your use case. If you're just looking to add SATA ports, aren't planning anything crazy, and don't want to shell out extra for something enterprise-grade, they should work fine.

I have a similar one in my NAS, along with a free 2-port card that came bundled with it. They work pretty well, and I haven't had any issues with either.

Any AsMedia, Marvel, etc. SATA card will do.

This one on Amazon is a PCIe 2x card, should do fine for a low-end setup: https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B00AZ9T41M/ref=twister_B0721DXJHL?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1

If you want something better, take a look at LSI cards, but that might be overkill for your needs.

Depends on how many drives you want to support. If only 4 or less you can get by with a cheapo PCIe SATA card like this one

If you want to go bigger, then you are looking at your original list... You can get them pre-flashed like this one

One thing to keep in mind, because that is a PCI-e 2.0 x1 card, it only has 500 MBps of total bandwidth. If you load it up with 4 HDDs, you won't get the full performance capabilities of the drives. If you load up just two SSDs, you'll hit bandwidth limits.

I am running one of these:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00AZ9T41M

It is PCIe 2.0 x2, so gives 1000MBps of bandwidth. I only run HDDs on it, so have no issues. But nice to know I have a bit of headroom if I later want to go with SSDs.

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant

Type|Item|Price

----|:----|:----
CPU | AMD - Ryzen 5 1600 3.2GHz 6-Core Processor | $196.44 @ OutletPC
Motherboard | Gigabyte - GA-AX370-Gaming ATX AM4 Motherboard | $111.87 @ OutletPC
Memory | Team - Vulcan 16GB (2 x 8GB) DDR4-2400 Memory | $122.99 @ Newegg
Storage | Crucial - MX300 275GB M.2-2280 Solid State Drive | $92.99 @ Newegg
Video Card | EVGA - GeForce GTX 1060 3GB 3GB GAMING Video Card | $184.99 @ Newegg
Case | Fractal Design - Define R5 (Black) ATX Mid Tower Case | $79.99 @ Newegg
Power Supply | SeaSonic - FOCUS Plus Gold 550W 80+ Gold Certified Fully-Modular ATX Power Supply | $79.90 @ Amazon
Optical Drive | LG - WH16NS40 Blu-Ray/DVD/CD Writer | $49.99 @ Amazon
| Prices include shipping, taxes, rebates, and discounts |
| Total (before mail-in rebates) | $949.16
| Mail-in rebates | -$30.00
| Total | $919.16
| Generated by PCPartPicker 2017-09-26 14:53 EDT-0400 |

Here is a slightly different build to consider. One main factor is that while you have 3 HDDs and an optical drive now, you may need to add more storage in the future. Given this, I have chosen both a case that can hold all that storage, as well as a motherboard that has enough SATA ports on it to make sure you can connect them all.

In doing this, the motherboard is definitely more expensive. The alternative would be spending less now, but being required to purchase a SATA expansion card later. If you are fine with adding in an expansion card later, or don't think you will need many more HDDs there are plenty of MOBOs available in the $60-70 range than have 6 SATA ports which would allow for 5 total HDDs w/ an optical drive.

Given the potential limit of available SATA ports, I have also chosen an m.2 SSD. As far as the optical drive goes, you mentioned needing one but didn't know if just for DVD but I picked a Bluray burner drive just in case. This can obviously be changed if needed.

The PSU selection also has 10 SATA power connectors, something you have to watch out for with PSU models is only having 6x SATA connectors and needing to use Molex adapters. The unit is also fully modular and has a 10 year warranty.

Its also possible to save money on GPU and drop down to a GTX 1050 Ti depending on what software you use and how you use it. In some scenarios software like Adobe Premiere will take advantage of a GPU, but the actual GPU isn't as important. But, in other situations the more powerful GPU actually yields faster render times. Linus has a video and Puget has a fairly detailed write up. But, that is just for Adobe Premiere, it could very well be different for different software.

In general, I would recommend doing some research on performance for whatever software you use, or are planning on using. All in all, you are going to want a well balanced system, but sometimes it makes sense to spend more or less on certain aspects if you know specific use-case scenarios will benefit from it or not.

It's not pretty. I am actually pretty ashamed of how they're in there being a server admin for work. - and honestly the drive layout was part of the reasoning why I'm moving to a real server. I got the 9020 for free - and started using it with FreeNAS a test to play with FreeNAS. It was lovely, and I just continued to use it without thinking of upgrading the host.

The 9020 has two bays for internal disks. Two are there.

The 9020 also has room for two optical disks- so in these two bays, I can fit two 3.5 inch drives each. I've separated them a bit with cardboard to reduce any vibration one disk may cause the one next to it. Four drives are there.

Lastly, there's some weird clip thing underneath the optical disk trays that I have no clue what its purpose is. Oddly enough, it's roughly 3.5" so I was able to park the last disk there.

I had run out of SATA ports on the motherboard, so I had to install this bad boy to get those drives connected. It actually works beautifully for my need. Also unfortunately needed one of these to get the final drive some power.

The server is still running great, it's definitely 'hacked' to work, and I don't want to continue to keep my important files here on a risky system.

I''ll shut down my server to take a picture for you of the internals if you're interested!

IO Crest SI-PEX40062 = Syba SI-PEX40062 which is the higher model

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00AZ9T41M?th=1

4-port SATA card: https://www.amazon.com/CREST-Drive-Controller-Marvell-Chipset/dp/B00AZ9T41M

Get some good SATA cables as well. One of the ones that came with the controller was bad for me.

thanks for those answers,

3) i looked around for what hba is apparently Host-Bus Adapter, I found some crazy expensive prices and some not that high, is this good for the job ?

Unraid looked nice and all but I would like to run a free/opensource software, and to my comprehension it isn't. Also I don't mind spending some time getting to know new tool and I'm decently familiar with linux cli.

5) that makes a lot of sense, separate box it will be.

I have a similar question. I am running Windows 10 and am out of ports. I was looking into getting an IO Crest card from Amazon. Would something like the 9211 be recommended over the IO card for me?

IO Crest SI-PEX40062 4 Port SATA III PCIe 2.0 X2 Controller Card https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00AZ9T41M/ref=cm_sw_r_other_apa_WAM.ybWGT24EH

I currently have 4 6tb red drives and am using Drivepool with the mirror set to X2. I just purchased 2 of the 8tb drives from best buy. ^I should probably move onto one of the other software raid systems with parity drives.

I bought this and hooked up mirrored ssds. It's not one if the "recommended" controllers, but those are all expensive and it can't be worse that USB. I'm also not using it for my data, just boot disks. Been running great for a while now on 12.2

I/O Crest 4 Port SATA III PCI-e 2.0 x2 Non RAID Hard Drive Controller Card Marvell 9235 Chipset https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00AZ9T41M/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_490wDbN3EC1NG

I bought a few of these from Amazon, there are non-RAID versions also.

RAID
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00AZ9T264

non-RAID
https://www.amazon.com/CREST-Drive-Controller-Marvell-Chipset/dp/B00AZ9T41M

Either should work; I have some B350 boards (Gigabyte and Asus, no AsRock), but nothing is setup for 3k series yet, they need flashed. I have a 3600, I can test one and let you know if you want.

Also, does it matter what slot your Syba card is in?