# Adding More SATA to Mobo It's either m.2 for client drives, and in the NAS box, it's an LSI SAS HBA. "Given any choice, I'd almost always choose more PCIe slots over anything else." Modern SATA connections can support up to 6 Gbps per If your motherboard's SATA ports are insufficient, you can add an HBA card to expand the number of SATA connections, but HBAs require available PCIe slots on your motherboard, potentially taking away expansion into SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) controllers vs SATA Expansion Cards (HBA – Host Bus Adapters) SATA HBAs What about a m.2 sata adapter? https://a.co/d/9tCAeVT\ will the SilverStone ECS07 SATA to M.2 adapter (it says "non-RAID") work with TrueNAS's ZFS? Yes. This isn't a port multiplier. It simple converts the x2 lanes provided to the M.2 socket to 5 SATA ports like a normal SATA PCIe HBA. That one works great under SCALE with no special considerations that I've noticed. I'm using it with an ASRock Rack miniITX motherboard in the M.2 socket provided. Or just get an LSI based SAS HBA of the known variety that work. (Aka don't get a MegaRAID one...) BUT CHECK the driver, because you DO NOT want to use a device that merely muliplies the SATA ports You probably don't want a poorly performing SATA controller for ZFS. The SST-ECS07 uses the JMicron JMB585 (JMI JMB585 SATA controller), I believe in a single 5-port configuration without a port multiplier. As [@jgreco](https://www.truenas.com/community/members/115/) stated if NCQ is disabled under FreeBSD (CORE) for stability reasons, performance will be poor. The LSI HBAs (like the [9211-8i](https://www.ebay.com/itm/163846248833?_skw=lsi&itmmeta=01JD0AZKM8C39850W4J4HZJ2EF&hash=item2625ff5981:g:shEAAOSwPKZdbst~), Marvell chipsets preferred?, pre-flashed on Ebay link) are the de facto choice, but obviously can't fit natively into an M.2 slot. LSI 9207-8i can handle 8 Seagate Exos x16 16TB drives at up to 260 MB/s over SATA 3 flash it to IT mode (specific hardware required) if you have onboard SATA you can still use those. For example it's better to plug an SSD into the onboard port so you can use TRIM which doesn't work when its plugged into an LSI or other HBA card. Get a mobo w 3 ports and the silverstone 5 adapter will fill case I think it requires A PCIe x 16 slot.