Port multipliers on PCIe X1 2.0 SATA expansion card

[TheDreadPirate]

I've used this PCIe SATA expansion card in my system and have had zero issues so far.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B09Y1NRHX3

This manufacturer does have a 6 and 10 port model. I had wanted the PCIe x4 model, but my mATX motherboard only had a x1 slot available.

Real world, the PCIe 2.0 1x bandwidth is probably not a practical limitation for serving video in Jellyfin. Even when serving multiple videos you have to consider the disk I/O performance when the disk has to split its time between multiple streams, transcoding performance, etc., when considering what the limiting factor will be.

If you plan on using your drives in a ZFS raid, PCIe bandwidth will definitely be a limiting factor for that. But, again, not a real world limitation.

For my ZFS array, I do connect the drives directly to the board since my use case does significantly benefit from the additional throughput. My drives not in the ZFS array are connected to the expansion card, but I push those pretty hard as well and have yet to encounter any issues.