SATA controllers for JBOD

[myren]

I'm looking on setting up a big JBOD (just a bunch of drives), and my mobo only has 6x SATA ports. Some day far away I may need up to 15 hard drives, and I'll need at least 10 right now. What SATA card should I buy?

Performance is a serious concern. The mobo has a somewhat old VIA chipset and I have not yet tested its performance, but if it ends up being under whatever addon card I use I'll want to migrate off my mobo's built in altogether. When I say performance, I'm most concerned about IOps.

This mobo has two PCIe 1x slots, two PCI slots, and one "spare" PCIe 16x slot. Thats pretty abysmal, I will nearly certainly end up hitting the PCIe bandwidth limit on the PCIe 1x.

Right now I'm leaning towards a Masscool SI3132-based controller; its PCIe 1x and 4 port. This is literally years ago (july 2006) but Anandtech had a review that incidentally mentioned it (although it was on-mobo) and it did very well. And the price is right! $20! I can fit two, which gets me to 14 ports (good enough).

Any other chipsets or cards I should investigate?

 

[myren]

Back to the drawing board, this board has 4x ports but only 2 ports work at any given time.

Suggestions for cheap reasonably performant SATA-II adapters with at least 4x ports?

 

[huskerpat]

That masscool card is really a 2 port card. there are 4 ports, but you can only use 2 at a time.