No question, but an important note: This card is NOT PCIe x4 - that's just the _mechanical_ connector! Electrically, as with practically all cards of this type, only TWO of the PCIe lanes are used - so in terms of throughput and performance you only have PCIe x2 available. Since it is PCIe 3.0, this is about 2GB/s, i.e. 16Gbit/s, which is not even enough to fully utilise 3 of the 16 SATA ports. With mechanical HDDs, however, the disc is limited to approx. 250MB/s anyway, so the 2GB/s are sufficient for approx. 8 HDDs.

I don't understand. This pcie card is PCIe 3.0 x4 lanes. So that's 4GB/s (32Gb/s). 1 sATA3 hdd is 6Gb/s. So 16 disks would be 96Gb/s. Does that mean that disks need to share bandwidth and not all of them can run at full speed at the same time (problematic for RAID arrays)? Or is 32GB/S enough for real-life speeds (6Gb/s per disk being a theoretical limit rather than an actually reachable speed)?