SATA 3 PCI controllers

SATA 3

— the presence of at least one SATA 3 connector on the controller board.

Initially, the SATA standard was developed for connecting internal drives, primarily hard drives (HDD). And SATA 3 is the most modern and fastest version of this interface: it provides data transfer rates up to 600 MB/s (4.8 Gbps). For hard drives, this is quite enough, but for faster SSD modules, this is not enough. So although PCI controllers with such an interface can still be found on the market, there are very few of them. The number of SATA 3 connectors depends on the type of controller (see the relevant paragraph): in expansion boards there can be only one such port, but in RAID modules there are at least 2, and more often 4.