Adding SATA Ports to an Old Desktop With a 4-Port PCIe Card
My Proxmox server, an HP Omen 870 desktop, has exactly three SATA ports, and all three were in use: one for the system SSD and two for a RAID-1 pair of hard drives. To add more drives I put in a cheap 4-port SATA card. It has worked with no drivers and no setup.
The card
- Chip: Marvell 88SE9215
- Ports: 4 × SATA 6 Gb/s
- Slot: PCIe 2.0 x1
Setup: there wasn’t any
Linux (here, Proxmox VE on Debian) uses its standard ahci driver for this chip. After installing the card the drives just appeared. No driver downloads, no BIOS changes.
The one limit to know about
A PCIe 2.0 x1 slot tops out around 500 MB/s, shared by all four ports. That’s fine for hard drives, which each manage roughly 150–200 MB/s, and it’s plenty for backups and media. It would hold back an SSD, so:
- Hard drives for backups, media or archives: great on the card
- The boot SSD: keep it on a motherboard port
What’s on it now
Two drives: a 1 TB WD Blue that will replace the oldest RAID member, and a 2 TB Hitachi for a media volume. One of my older drives only supports SATA 3 Gb/s and links at that speed; the card handles mixed speeds without complaint.
A tip: identify drives by serial number
Adding a controller reshuffles Linux drive letters. Mine have changed between reboots at least five times, so /dev/sda today may be /dev/sdc tomorrow. Use the stable names under /dev/disk/by-id/, which include the model and serial number, in every command and config file.
The verdict: no setup, it just works. A cheap, boring card that quietly does its job is exactly what you want holding your backup drives.