The 5 Best Mini Pcie Sata cards (2023 reviews)

The card is a must have accessory for your daily purpose. This class of devices describes a generic system memory structure with control and status areas, command sequence entry tables. It's minimally sized, shows up in Linux, and provides full speed to at least 2 drives. It's also allows for either achi, ide, or non boot modes. The amount of bandwidth is divided up amongst four lanes and the amount of data bursts depends on the drive (s) theoretical and physical capabilities.

This simply provides extra sata ports. It will allow the computer to see the drives plugged into it, just like the controller on your PC. The card is trivial to install and works perfectly. It posts fine without any new drivers or bios tweaks in AHCI mode, and runs flawless in Windows.

Why We Like This:

Comes with sata cables which is a plus
All cables included to connect sata devices
Easy way to add more drives
Nice, compact size and very easy to install

Best With Windows: Startech Mini Pcie Sata Card

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Not everyone likes to purchase card for their regular usage, but the startech mini pcie sata card would be an anomoly. It is indeed a hardware raid with its own raid bios. This sata card enables the connection of eight high. It can only handle two drives at a time. The SATA connectors have seven pins and the connectors on this board have 36 connections, more than enough to support four SATA devices each. It takes only seconds but requires re-boot.

The controller is recognized by Windows 7 and works fine with the standard Windows 7 Drivers. It is allows for eight total sata (serial ata) 6gbps ports through a single x4 pcie slot, enabling combined total throughput up to 20gbps.

Why We Like This:

Down side, makes it hard to route cables to far from the card
Supports sata port multiplier for additional ports
Style cabling and reliable drive connections
Great product for upgrading your computer

Best With full size Card Type form factor: IO Crest Mini Pcie Sata Card

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The io crest mini pcie sata card might be a relatively new release, but it's still nothing short of impressive this year. This controller card tells you to not boot your os on it. It allows support of two sata devices at speeds of up to 6gb/s whether it is a sata hard drive or sata device. This product needs a second revision with a thicker pcb, better solder joints, a chunky heatsink on the controller, and full use of the x4 pcie lanes. This is better than the PCIe variants and takes up no room.

The device works just fine on linux based servers where NAS capacity can be increased three fold if all nvme slots on a server board are used. The sata slots are also only soldered in by their data connectors, making this product super delicate and 'once connected, never moved. It will default to nvme or sata protocol.

Why We Like This:

Has good/decent read/write speeds with multiple disks (zfs) attached and heavy data transfers
Works great for adding additional sata devices
Works great to add 5 sata ports to a mobo with a m.2 slot

Best For Your Use: LSI Mini Pcie Sata Card

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Next on the list, we've got yet another card that manages to win our hearts. It's the lsi mini pcie sata card and it's widely considered as card that has the most suitable features. It is the LSA version of the hp h221 8-port external sas card. It presents each drive in the enclosure as an individual device. It is perfect for people that are using FreeNAS or ZFS for the RAID. This card has no hardware raid function. It’s perfect for your use, assuming your tape drive is SAS and you have a matching SAS cable.

Why We Like This:

Handles 1024 hard drives, dual ported external was ports perfect for connecting jbods
Good brand reputation

Best For Sata Hard Drive: Silverstone technology Mini Pcie Sata Card

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The features department is where silverstone technology mini pcie sata card truly manages to shine. It comes with large graphics cards, mainstream motherboards often have most of their pcie slots blocked, so you can’t go the old sas card route, either. It has a jmicron jmb585 controller. It offers expansion of up to 5 sata gen3 ports, capable of reaching 1700mb/s. This means it'll easily handle all 5 SATA ports (SATA port's theoretical maximum is 6Gbps) running at full speed. The card's PCIe interface has a theoretical bandwidth of up to 16 GT/s which is equivalent to about 1024 Gbps.

It has a linux kernel 6.x fedora 37, asrock z690m-itx/ax mother board, and intel i7 12700 cpu. The two notch design is still compatible with M.2 NVMe slots so you can safely and reliably use this on your motherboard's M.2 slot.

Why We Like This: