The 8 Best na Controller cards (2023 reviews)

We are personally inclined towards ziyituod na controller card, it is not so pricy, but it overachieves its purpose and outstanding in important aspects. The Marvel controller is WAAAY better than the ones with Assmedia drivers. It can be used on many motherboards that offer more sata ports than the cpu/chipset natively support. It posts fine without any new drivers or bios tweaks in AHCI mode, and runs flawless in Windows. It comes with using the ASMedia1062 chip, more stable and compatible.

The SATA hard drives are limited to around 500 MB/sec and the ASMedia 1064 can easily run at those speeds so anything more seems like overkill. It works great for adding more drives but it adds about 10 seconds to boot time while initializing only one drive. It is great for a small zfs server.

Why We Like This:

More hard drives in a workstation
Easy way to add sata ports
Easy install and worked 'plug and play' as a secondary card
Transfer speeds are comparable to the onboard sata controller

Best For adding More Drives: JESOT na Controller Card

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Next on the list, we've got yet another card that manages to win our hearts. It's the jesot na controller card and it's widely considered as card that has the most suitable features. It uses the Marvell 88SE9215 controller which is Pcie 2.0 x. It offers 4 sata slots to work with. It comes with a heat sink, can help fast heat dissipation and realize full potential of high performance. It is used to attach 4 more hard drives to an msi b450 tomahawk that works out of the box with windows 10 64bit. This is a Non-RAID card. It is great way to add more sata to your PC. It is perfect for adding more drives. The installation process is super simple.

Why We Like This:

Drives available, no additional drivers or settings needed
Perfect recovery aid for new pc
Works perfect and came with 4 sata cables
Set up of software raid was also very easy during install of ubuntu server

Best With open media vault: MZHOU na Controller Card

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Best part: mzhou na controller card costs comparatively low and it is available to ship in 24 hours. It is a marvell 88se9215 + jmicron jmb5xx 8-port chip. It is used to connect a 3-hdd raidz1 zfs array, with an ssd log drive in a proxmox homelab. The default driver windows installed for all SATA cards will work for the 2 and 4 port options.

The 6 SATA cables are the type with metal retention clip. It's meant for adding mechanical storage. It is perfectly in an unraid server running multiple vms and plex.

Why We Like This:

Simple to install and worked great
Good brand reputation

Best For extra Hard Drives: Startech na Controller Card

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We would, of course, be remiss if we didn't mention startech na controller card for regular usage. The 8p6g-pcie-sata-cARD does support hot-plugging drives. It uses 2 lanes, for a max of 8gbit / sec. It can be used in a ubuntu software raid 5 environment. It is allows for eight total sata (serial ata) 6gbps ports through a single x4 pcie slot, enabling combined total throughput up to 20gbps.

This card has the capability to do raid. There are header pins for optional drive activity LEDs. It takes only seconds but requires re-boot.

Why We Like This:

Supports sata port multiplier for additional ports
Style cabling and reliable drive connections
Low cost raid controller that works / easy to set up

Best With Openmediavault: IO Crest na Controller Card

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The io crest na controller card is the best convenient card on the market today. This controller card tells you to not boot your OS on it. It is compatible with sata hard drives & solid state drives and computer systems with sata controllers. The device works just fine on linux based servers where NAS capacity can be increased three fold if all NAS slots on a server board are used. This expansion card has worked flawlessly and transparently. It's thin and flexes easily.

It will support whatever protocol your motherboard's m.2 port is designed for. This device uses NVMe but is compatible with SATA hard drives & solid state drives and computer systems with sata controllers.

Why We Like This:

Works great for adding additional sata devices
Has good/decent read/write speeds with multiple disks (zfs) attached and heavy data transfers
Lot of satisfied buyers

Best With Mostall: 10Gtek na Controller Card

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If you often find yourself scrambling for appropriate and satisfactory card, 10gtek na controller card is your end point. This card supports sata hard drives. It provides eight lanes of 6gb/s sas connectivity and is matched with eight lanes of pcie 2.0 5gb/s performance. It can connect to 8 drives in default. If you have enough room around the card and keep it cool, ( a typical case fan is enough) it can get quite hot depending on how you set it up. This is desirable for ZFS setups. It will support two 20tb sas hdd's theoretically, and your operating system needs being supportive as well. This card has current drivers for W10 and Linux. It is a good choice for low-end internal storage, like home nas with gigabit connections.

Why We Like This:

Worked perfectly for an unraid server sata ports expansion
Physical board looks to made high quality
Good choice for low-end home nas

Best For offering Sata Ports: Febsmart na Controller Card

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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 card. The febsmart na controller card is exactly that - it's a simple card that hits all the right notes. It's great for offering sata ports. With modern CPUs, they have 16 PCIe lanes to go to the slots, and at least 4 lanes to go directly to an NVMe port. It will provide 6x none-raid sata iii 6gbps ports on desktop pcs, working stations, mac pros, network attached storage (nas), allow users to light up 6x hdds/ssds in its system. 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
Support plug and play on most main stream linux kernel system

Best Feature: Easy To Install: Orico na Controller Card

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The orico na controller card might be a relatively new release, but it's still nothing short of impressive this year. It is a perfect solution for a motehrboard that only has one slot for multiple ide devices. 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 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 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.

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.

Why We Like This: