I'm upgrading hardware. My old mobo has about 20 SATA ports. My new one has 8 but a few extra M.2 slots and some PCIe slots. I'd rather use the extra M.2 ports, and as few of them as possible. I was thinking of this:
https://www.amazon.com/Internal-Non-Raid-Adapter-Desktop-Support/dp/B07T3RMFFT
but I would need 2. My mobo uses PCIe 4.0 but I don't think there is anything out there for that yet (my thinking being more bandwidth, more ports, fewer slots taken). I was also looking at using SAS to breakout to SATA but I know little about SAS and haven't had any experience with it. This is my new mobo:
https://www.gigabyte.com/us/Motherboard/TRX40-DESIGNARE-rev-10#kf
Basically, I need about 10 more SATA ports but I want to occupy as few slots as possible, and preferably use the M.2 slots instead of PCIe. Everything I have looked as so far only offers about 4 or 5 SATA ports. Any suggestions?

Edited March 6, 20215 yr by bobbintb

If you can accept use two M.2 slot and ten SATA cable then fine.

SAS + Expander still the best, it support many device, easy cabling and have great flexibility, but expensive. 

3 minutes ago, Vr2Io said:

If you can accept use two M.2 slot and ten SATA cable then fine.

SAS + Expander still the best, it support many device, easy cabling and have great flexibility, but expensive. 

But even with SAS + expander, I can only breakout to 4x SATA. I would need 2 to get 8x SATA and not 10. Any cards that give more?

29 minutes ago, bobbintb said:

But even with SAS + expander, I can only breakout to 4x SATA. I would need 2 to get 8x SATA and not 10. Any cards that give more?

Some HBA have 16 or 24 port in one card, but crazy expensive. Solution was use cheap 8 port HBA with cheap 16 port expander for 16 disks. ( One SAS socket support 4 disks )

 

For example

 

Edited March 6, 20215 yr by Vr2Io

7 hours ago, Vr2Io said:

Some HBA have 16 or 24 port in one card, but crazy expensive. Solution was use cheap 8 port HBA with cheap 16 port expander for 16 disks. ( One SAS socket support 4 disks )

 

For example

 

Those all seem to be PCIe 2.0 as well, which would be a pretty big limitations.

edit: I also just realized the M.2 card I listed uses only 2 lanes, so it's already bottlenecked, unfortunately.

Edited March 7, 20215 yr by bobbintb

8 hours ago, bobbintb said:

only 2 lanes, so it's already bottlenecked,

Unless you're going to use them with SSDs there's enough bandwidth, see here:

 

 

10 hours ago, JorgeB said:

Unless you're going to use them with SSDs there's enough bandwidth, see here:

 

 

That's a good point. I was thinking so much about the theoretical bandwidth I didn't even consider my existing drives aren't even going to get anywhere near that anyway. I think at this point I just need to buy somethings and quit overthinking it.

I personally bought a LSI SAS 9201 16i for about 100 euros on eBay. You can add 16 SATA drives with it. No BIOS/firmware flashing required since it is just a HBA controller and not a RAID controller.