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If it's for hard drives you can get one of the cheap cards, try to get one that you can find info/drivers on, though. If have an Asrock SATA3 that works fine, and several Marvell eSATA2 that are good too.
If you are looking for the faster performance that SATA3 provides be very careful regarding which PCI-e card you buy. The inexpensive cards are SATA3 but have only one PCI-e lane, resulting in no improvement in performance compared to on board SATA2 interfaces. Be certain to buy a x 2 or x 4 card (that is, one that uses either 2 or 4 PCI-e lanes).
Top of my head, the only reasons to get a PCIe SATA card are:
- You need a real hardware RAID device (which you stated you don't).
- The mainboard doesn't have enough SATA ports to support the number of needed storage devices.
- The mainboard only has SATA2 and you want to install a SSD. A SATA3 card will allow the drive to transfer data to/from a SSD much faster.
If you plan to get a card to support a SSD make sure it's bootable.
Can you recommend for (or against) specific models here?
If the card is PCIe 3.0 then it will have 985MB/s per lane which is faster than SATA3.
Even PCIe 2.0 is 500MB/s per lane which is in between SATA2 and SATA3.
PCI-e 2.0 is 250MB in each direction. A more detailed description is found here: http://www.tested.com/tech/457440-theoretical-vs-actual-bandwidth-pci-express-and-thunderbolt/
I have tested at least 5 PCI-e 2.0 SATA expansion cards with various SSDs and have not found any single lane cards that are capable of writing more than ~250MB/sec. Two lane cards generally get to 500MB/sec write speeds.
3rd point is irrelevant for general OS usage, but you don't really want to put an OS on a PCI-E SATA card anyways.
Any decent HBA will have much higher IOPS even without cache, the LSI 9211 I have can achieve much higher IOPS than the ICH10, I've seen 100k IOPS and 1500MB/s with a 6 disk SSD array, the specs list 275k IOPS!
Limited to 2TB drives though. Same with the PERC6 series. Need to get an H700 or newer to get 3 and 4TB support.get a dell perc5i card and grab a northbridge with fan and epoxy it on there. works awesome. the perc5i cards are like $30 on the ebay.
Limited to 2TB drives though. Same with the PERC6 series. Need to get an H700 or newer to get 3 and 4TB support.
The PCIe bandwidth is there, it just depends on how well the card is built and if it can actually utilize it all properly. I don't know how well I would trust Sil or Marvell to get there which is why I went with the ASM1061.