I have maxed out all of my SATA controller cards and onboard ports and I'm looking to expand. I currently have 6 drives connected to the motherboard SATA ports, 4 drives connected to a Promise SATA300 TX4 card in a PCI  slot, 2 drives connected to a SiiG 3132 PCIe 1x card, and a cache drive connected to a motherboard IDE port. I have 2 open PCIe 1x slots and 1 open PCI slot. My Gigabyte motherboard does not have onboard video, so I am currently using a spare PCIe 16x video card I had laying around. I was thinking of buying an Adaptec 1430SA, but I would need to swap out that PCIe 16x video card and probably by an inexpensive PCI video card like a Diablotek. From reading different posts on the forum I know that PCIe is the better way to go, especially for partiy checks. It would be cheaper to by 2 additional Siig 3132 PCie 1x cards instead of 1 Adaptec 1430SA. Would there be any concerns with me running 3 Siig 3132 cards? 

It would be cheaper to by 2 additional Siig 3132 PCie 1x cards instead of 1 Adaptec 1430SA. Would there be any concerns with me running 3 Siig 3132 cards?

 

The only issue may be the amount of reserved ROM bios space.  Other then that I do not see an issue. I have two SIL 3132 PCIe 1x cards in my machine.

However, I would look at using the widest band width possible for my drives.

I.E.Swapping out the PCIe 16X Video for a PCI version and putting a controller card there.

In doing so, I would put the fastest, largest drive there and make that the parity drive, then perhaps use the IDE drive as data or cache drive.

 

The PCIe 1X cards buy you a cheaper incremental upgrade. I've seen these cards for $20 or so. 

Therefore,  if the amount laid out is your main concern, you can go this route pretty safely. (at least I have without an issue).