Review on 🖥️ StarTech.com 7 Port PCI Express USB 3.0 Card - Enhanced Connectivity with UASP Support - SATA Power - Versatile Standard & Low-Profile Design - 1 Internal & 6 External USB 3.0 Ports (PEXUSB3S7) by Scott King

I built the NAS using an old Lynnfield-era PC with CentOS 7 HD internal. The Highpoint controller works fine, but requires a kernel module that needs to be compiled whenever the kernel is updated. This annoyed me and I wanted a hardware solution that didn't require a kernel module. I chose the StarTech card, although based on my experience with StarTech, it is 3 times more expensive than Chinese cards. They make very good quality stuff. Their engineers design great boards that won't break. Since I rely on my system data, I have chosen high-quality components. I bought two of these cards. They each have six external USB 3.0 ports, so I have a total of 12 ports connected to 12 USB 3.0 hard drives. I am using zfs with raidz3. That's 48 TB of original storage with 30 TB of usable storage. I see 60MB/s writing to an array from /dev/zero with 'dd'. While it's a good thing to have internal drives for the NAS for a clean and compact setup; it would be nice to be able to easily disconnect and connect a spare drive if I encounter a drive failure. I have two large splitters to connect all 12 HD power transformers.