The 9 Best Hard Drive Controller cards (2023 reviews)

Ziyituod line of card come in a pretty wide variety of styles, so you can definitely find one that suits your individual preferences and needs. It is great, recognized in bios as a "bookable card. It is typical of a sata port multiplier using pci-e x. It posts fine without any new drivers or bios tweaks in AHCI mode, and runs flawless in Windows. It comes with this you have no pre start up screens. The card will spin-up the drives. It will allow the computer to see the drives plugged into it, just like the controller on your PC. It works with no issues plus comes with 5 sata ports.

Why We Like This:

More hard drives in a workstation
Transfer speeds are comparable to the onboard sata controller
Easy way to add more drives

Best For adding More Drives: JESOT Hard Drive Controller Card

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If you often find yourself scrambling for convenient and suitable card, jesot hard drive controller card is your end point. It is best with linux based os (many nas are linux based), especially if you might want to add more drives later on. If you are out of SATA connections and have a spare X1 or even standard PCI Express slot, this is a good add on for additional SATA drives. It comes with a heat sink, which can help fast heat dissipation and realize full potential of high performance.

This is a simple drop-it-in-the-box-and-forget-it card, and it works perfectly. It comes with 4 ports and also it is running a 10 op system. It is perfect for adding more drives. The care is easy to install and works perfectly with no problems.

Why We Like This:

Lots of ports with 2 'internal' ports
Great value and impressed with the speed of the card
Good brand reputation

Best addon Card: Syba Hard Drive Controller Card

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The syba hard drive controller card should be able to handle its purpose and duties with ease. It is a fine card for old school mechanical drives and cd/dvd reader/writers. It works perfectly for cd drives. It's size is very minimalistic, doesn't get in the way, and most importantly it does the job.

This card works and has two SATA connections inside the PC case. It is good for using a motherboard sata port. It is great for adding two more sata ports, if you own a bunch of hdds/ssds.

Why We Like This:

Perfect way to add more sata drives to a system
Easier to just put cd/dvd drives on it and not worry
Good investment for long term

Best With open media vault: MZHOU Hard Drive Controller Card

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We would, of course, be remiss if we didn't mention mzhou hard drive controller card for daily usage. If you want a simple and small solution to expand your sata storage by 8x then this is the way to go. It is a marvell 88se9215 + jmicron jmb5xx 8-port chip. It is perfectly in an unraid server running multiple vms and plex. The motherboard would show the UEFI BIOS splash screen and then just sit there forever, unable to progress or boot into any operating system or even pull up the BIOS pages. It does work on a PCI-E 4x slot. The metal of the backplate is nice. The card itself is great and works well.

Why We Like This:

Works with unraid in a plex server
Easy to install and bios/os had no trouble with it at all
Good investment for long term

Best For extra Hard Drives: Startech Hard Drive Controller Card

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The features department is where startech hard drive controller card truly manages to shine. Featuring hyperduo technology, the sata card offers ssd auto-tiering which lets you balance the performance advantages of ssd storage with the cost-effectiveness and large capacity of standard hard drives. It uses 2 lanes, for a max of 8gbit / sec. It can transfer at 6gbits/sec, if the drive can read/write at that rate. It includes full and low-profile brackets for pcie slot compatibility.

This card has the capability to do raid. It will work with any Window 10 version and will support upto 64TB HDD per port due to 48bits LBA. It is great for extra hard drives and hot swap.

Why We Like This:

Treats drives attached as removable, not internals
Supports sata port multiplier for additional ports
Connection drops and the transfer speed is good
Low cost raid controller that works / easy to set up

Best With Sata: Mhqjrh Hard Drive Controller Card

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The mhqjrh hard drive controller card is satisfactory and appropriate and fits well with your daily usage. It comes with a low profile bracket and 4 sata cable,compatible with 99% size chassis on the market. It can be used on pcie x4 x8 x16 slots. It's running at a RAID5 with 8tb and preforms a hot swap without drive interruptions. As the picture shows, the adapter comes assembled with a regular height bracket and includes an optional short bracket. It is compatible with sata 2.0 and sata 1.

Why We Like This:

Useful to convert old motherboards in excellent nas boxes
Excellent upgrade for pc towers that don't have card readers
Delivers what they promise

Best upgrade Card: GODSHARK Hard Drive Controller Card

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For a low asking price, godshark hard drive controller card has managed to overwhelm their customers by packing as many features as they could. It is a great upgrade card for older motherboards that won’t have the 6 GB ssd spades. It boots to the bio screen then to the raid controller and then pauses and boots. The card comes with an optional raid utility which lets you configure a raid 0 raid 1 or raid 0+1 setup on two or more of the sata ports.

Why We Like This:

Accomplishes the goal of having additional sata ports
Delivers what they promise

Best With Windows: YUNKOZAND Hard Drive Controller Card

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Compared with other card in this category, the yunkozand hard drive controller card has a convenient design. SATA PCIE cards are paired with heatsinks for long-lasting high temperature resistance. It provides 8 sata 3.0 ports and 8 sata cables, supports simultaneous connection of 8 sata hard drives, with a transmission speed of up to 6gbps. It is used for faster than a sata ssd drive speeds. The data is stored on multiple hard disks to form a whole, and the theoretical speed is twice that of a single hard disk.

It improves the stability and compatibility of this pcie to sata card. The cooler is more than adequate, and under load it barely gets warm. It is compatible with pcie x1, x4, x8, x16 slots. This card also has a heat sink for long-lasting high temperature resistance.

Why We Like This:

Supports 4tb and 6tb and higher hard drives
Works great with unraid and truenas
Good brand reputation

Best Feature: Easy To Install: Orico Hard Drive Controller Card

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The orico hard drive controller card's high-end materials makes sure that it ages well with use. For quick reference this board uses an ASMedia SATA controller that supports PCI passthrough so you can hand it from a hypervisor to a VM. It can configure a raid (computer supports raid) with the drives connected to the card. The disks are setup as 4 mirrored pairs with one pair on the motherboard's SATA controller and its mirror on the m.2 adapter card. There is a data cable, and a power cable. The 7th image for this item gives the impression that there's a built-in configuration menu which can be used for Raid configuration and Free Drive.

There are stand-alone power brick to molex options, that you can then adapt to sata power 'y' splitters. The controller runs hot when in use, even if you have good airflow over the area the card is installed in, a heatsink on the controller chip does wonders.

Why We Like This:

Built-in raid tools or any configuration tools
Led indicator monitoring, monitoring the working status of the hard disk at any time
Good investment for long term