There's a lovely option these days with enterprise level motherboards from Asus. The illusive PIKE Slot. I say illusive because there's not much information out there about them. Or How to flash them should you need to.   Basically it's a proprietary pcie slot that when populated allows access to 8 extra SATA3/SAS2 ports on the motherboard. It's basically the same thing as an AOC-MV8 or M1015 but without taking up a normally placed PCIE slot on the mobo, pretty sweet IMHO.   Any way, these