What you are looking for is an eSATA PCI card and this will be 'plug
and go' ( with the power off whilst plugging in of course ) in any OS.

There are ones that have internal SATA ports too so that's not a
problem but the issue with eSATA is getting power to the external
drive as the port itself is just for data. There are eSATA caddies
which have separate power supplies so that's always an option.

BTW - sound like the USB isn't USB 2.0 as that would have copied
11.4Gb a lot faster ( could be the port on the system or the caddy
that's not USB 2.0 ).