Asmedia ASM1064: 20-port PCIe 3.0 SATA controller

Nowadays no one expected that the need for a large number of drives would arrive so quickly. Previously regular motherboards had just two SATA ports. Later options appeared with four or six ports and some models even had eight with hardware raid support. Such motherboards mostly interested only enthusiasts. But now everything has changed.
The boom in hard drive mining came in May 2021 when the creator of BitTorrent decided to launch a new project called Chia on the market. At that time besides some shortages of high capacity drives and SSDs which lasted less than the average lifespan of a fly a new problem emerged. It involved connecting a large number of HDDs to a single PC. By the moment the Chia network was actively developing miners faced a real challenge and solving it was quite difficult. People familiar with server equipment knew how to connect and combine all the drives on one PC but ordinary users unfortunately did not. Yet a solution eventually appeared and China managed to create a device that solved the issue although not entirely in time.

A little over six months ago controllers based on the ASM1064 chip began appearing on Ali. The chip supports PCIe Gen3 x1 and works with only four SATA Gen3 ports. It offers low cost low power consumption and AHCI with minimal latency. Overall this model was released before the creation of various high speed input output systems including servers large scale storage or surveillance platforms. A bonus of this chip is multi port support. Adding a JMB575 to one port gives five virtual ports from one physical. This is how the Chinese created ready made ASM1064+JMB575 versions with 4 6 8 12 16 or 20 ports. After the Chia hype prices for such controllers dropped by two to three times and now they can be purchased for a small amount of money. Since the next price surge has not yet affected this segment miners of BitcoinHD Signa Litecoinhd Mass Arweave Chives Flax and hddcoin are starting to buy them slightly increasing the demand for these products.