Windows 10: Question about adding SATA ports.

I have a home built with an ASUS Z87-A MB. It's current main use is as an HTPC and has four 4TB drives full of media and I need to add another. I have space in the case for several more drives but am using all 6 ports on the MB for those 4 plus an SSD boot and a DVD drive.

I could retire the SSD and move Windows to a 5th new media drive. I could replace 4TB drives with larger ones, or I could add SATA ports. The latter seemed preferable but I'm not understanding something about add on PCIe cards.

I see a bunch of low priced X1 cards with various number of ports claiming to provide up to 6GB/sec (SATA III) speeds. But I thought that an X1 card has lower throughput than even one SATA III drive (500 vs 600). I also see several X2 or X4 cards but those all have features I don't care about at prices up to five times as high.

For possible futures, I want at least 2 ports and I want them to have similar performance to SATA III MB ports. I realize I probably don't need that performance to consume media but I like to keep options open, not to mention not wanting future backups to take forever(times 2) instead of just forever. LoL

So, I am thinking I may be misunderstanding if an X1 card can give the same performance as SATA III drives connected to the MB ports otherwise I don't understand why I don't find X2 or X4 cards that just provide 2-4 extra ports and not even more ports or RAID capability, or external ports, etc. that drive the prices way up.

Thanks for any clarification or advice.

:)

 

Sata ports question

Hello all, will i have my 970 m.2 as my boot drive, but i am not seeing any significant increase in boot time ? is there somthing that i am missing in the BIOS ?

i have also ran Samsung magician and crystal mark and these are my results

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970 Before TRIM




970 After TRIM





970 Crystal mark

 

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hello and thanks for your reply, i am not sure which one of my disk in actually in which sata port






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Hello i have successfully Cloned my 850 evo to my 970 m.2 ssd