DougShields

Not necessarily - usually it's a multiplier, but that is not the only possible solution. A multiplier splits at the SATA level, a bridge splits at the PCIe level. It is effectively the same as having additional controllers. In this case two ASM1064 controllers which have 4 ports each. With the obvious limitation that they must split bandwidth. Some of the LSI SAS HBAs are actually very similar where they plant 2 controllers on 1 card in order to double the port count while also doubling the capacity and cost.

I was doing some research today, thought I would pass this along. Looking at the SD-PEX40163 8 Port SATA III to PCIe 3.0 x1 NON-RAID Expansion Card SD-PEX40163 Uses Two ASM1064 connected to a ASM1182e PCI-e Bridge and the SI-PEX40165 8 Port SATA III to PCIe 3.0 x1 NON-RAID Expansion Card SI-PEX40165 Uses Two ASM1064 connected to a ASM1806 PCI-e Bridge The ASM1182e and the ASM1806 are PCIe 2.0 bridge chips, so the description of the card as being PCIe 3.0 x1 is wrong. The ASM1064 is a PCIe 3.0 chip, but that doesn’t matter once it’s behind the PCIe 2.0 bridge chip. ASM1806 ASM1182e ASM1064 It looks like the 16 port SD-PEX40164 uses Four ASM1064 with an ASM2806 which is PCIe 3.1, but for double the price. I've e-mailed Syba USA to see if they have an explanation, but I don't expect a real answer. Background: This is for legacy spinning rust, the main storage is NVMe, the good slots have NICs in them, so I'm looking at PCIe 3.0 x1 cards for good reason.