The 9 Best Hard Drive Raid controllers (2023 reviews)

Ziyituod line of controller 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 functionality: BEYIMEI Hard Drive Raid Controller

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We know from years of feedback from readers, customers and amazon sellers, what most people want in a convenient and appropriate controller. The beyimei hard drive raid controller is exactly that - it's a simple controller that hits all the right notes. The fact the card has six SATA-III 6Gbps outputs gives plenty of capacity to run additional hardware. It will fit a pciex1 slot because the pciex1 slot is shorter. The drives attached to this card are recognized prior to the motherboard SATA. It includes all the cables you need.

This card does not have any RAID support, whereas most motherboards have internal RAID support. The stability is very good. It comes with all the cables you need.

Why We Like This:

Easy way to add more sata ports
Very nice adapter card for nvme drive
Small footprint with included low-profile bracket

Best addon Card: Syba Hard Drive Raid Controller

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We would, of course, be remiss if we didn't mention syba hard drive raid controller for daily purpose. This little beauty and a 120GB SSD/1 TB 7200 rpm Sata III drive breathe new life into an ageing high end desktop computer. It is good for adding two more sata ports, if you own a bunch of hdds/ssds. It is a fine card for old school mechanical drives and cd/dvd reader/writers.

The card comes with two brackets. It's size is very minimalistic, doesn't get in the way, and most importantly it does the job. It works perfectly for cd drives. It is easy to install and hookup your drives since the ports are on the side.

Why We Like This:

Easier to just put cd/dvd drives on it and not worry
Good investment for long term

Best For extra Hard Drives: Startech Hard Drive Raid Controller

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Startech offers a variety of controller for personal choice and yet maintaining quality in all the variants. The PEXSAT34RH uses a Marvell chipset which has a "Marvell Storage Utility. 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 includes full and low-profile brackets for pcie slot compatibility. It can only handle two drives at a time.

The card is shuffling a few tbs around while simultaneously rsync'ing many files over a couple of 1 gb network connections. The configuration tool is powerful and easy to set up. It includes marvell storage utility software for monitoring raid status from within windows.

Why We Like This:

Style cabling and reliable drive connections
Great product for upgrading your computer
Down side, makes it hard to route cables to far from the card
Worked plug and play with windows 8 and did not require any additional drivers

Best For offering Sata Ports: Febsmart Hard Drive Raid Controller

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We know from years of feedback from readers, customers and amazon sellers, what most people want in a convenient and appropriate controller. The febsmart hard drive raid controller is exactly that - it's a simple controller that hits all the right notes. It is great for offering sata ports. It is based on asmedia asm1166 pcie 3.0 to sata iii host controller, will support plug and play on windows os, mac os, and linux kernel systems. It is designed on pcie 3.0 x4 interface, will provide 16gbps total bandwidth, and each sata 3.0 ports will get 6gbps max speed for connected hdds/ssds. It also works just fine with optical drives, unlike a lot of other SATA expansion cards.

It's best to add a single drive at a time if these are new drives. It is used to be the direct connection between pcie slots and the cpu. It will also work in a x1 interface if necessary and your mobo has an open backed x1 slot. This contains a firmware flasher that works with this card as well, and enables support for z690 motherboards.

Why We Like This:

Plug and play on windows and linux systems
Windows 11 64bit supports plug and play
Good brand reputation

Best upgrade Card: GODSHARK Hard Drive Raid Controller

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The godshark hard drive raid controller's material feels more premium than its price would suggest. 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
Good investment for long term

Best For Server And enterprise applications: Dell Hard Drive Raid Controller

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Not everyone likes to purchase controller for their regular usage, but the dell hard drive raid controller would be an anomoly. It runs like a champ in a dell r710 server to add 4tb drives. It offers the h700 with battery and 2 backplane cables. It draws power from its PCIe interface. It is great in a dell r710 server to add 4tb drives. It is also capable of zft and jbod setups as well with out the higher level raid functions and write cache.

This card works on a non-Dell system board and is automatically recognized by Win 7 and Win. As like many other raid controller cards, this one also runs hot. It is a home lab with lite usage. This card is very fast and supports HW RAID well with SSD.

Why We Like This:

Works out of the box with client os's
Great fast well insulated to the last frontier
Lot of satisfied buyers

Best For Professional administrators: High point Hard Drive Raid Controller

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High Point offers a variety of controller for personal choice and yet maintaining quality in all the variants. RocketRAID 3700 adapters allow customers to use both 12G/6G SAS and 6G SATA hard drives and SSD’s in a wide range of RAID configurations, with internal, external or Hybrid port connectivity, across a variety of operating system and hardware platforms. It is designed for use with the rocketraid 3700 series, rocketraid 2840a, and rocketraid 840a raid controllers, and has been tested with a wide range of enterprise and pro-nas class sas hard drives up to 16tb in capacity.

This card has an onboard ram cache and connections for members of the raid array. It features that enable administrators to easily schedule verification sessions to ensure the health of each raid storage configuration. You will definitely be able to use more than 8 devices on the 3740A, it has 4 sas connectors so it can have 16 drives directly connected. It is ideal for customers who are new to raid technology.

Why We Like This:

Flexible sas + sata ssd/hdd array & storage configurations
Works with windows server 2016, with qualifications
Lot of satisfied buyers

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

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The orico hard drive raid controller is satisfactory and appropriate and fits well with your daily purpose. 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. It is compatible with sata interface mechanical hard drives/ssd solid state hard drives/optical drives, etc. It can configure a raid (computer supports raid) with the drives connected to the card. There is a data cable, and a power cable.

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. 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
Lot of satisfied buyers