Non-RAID Conrollers / understand max bandwidth of drives

[Sugar Kaine Mostly]

My board has a max of two SATA III (Marvell) slots which are currently occupying my 2x2 TB RAID 0 configuration HDDs.

I have several SSDs which I want to use but are occupied in the SATA II ports, including my main boot SSD. My SSD's are all SATA III.

So my question is, what is the maximum bandwidth of data or I guess speed per Controller SATA III Non-RAID controller card. Is PCIe 2.0 x2 Low Profile the method? I see many cards come in 2-4 slot configurations even up to 8. Since they're cheap I prefer individual lanes per SSD. Is this ok to theorize or is it overkill that one card is enough?

I have a 240gb Neutron XT, Vertex 4 128gb, and a HyperX 120gb. I will mainly be using these for various 4K codecs and media cache allocations.

Best regards.

 

[joex444]

I'm not sure what you're asking, but I do want to point out that if your RAID array is created with the controller then you can't move it - it's tied to those ports from the Marvell controller. Which would explain why it looks like you're trying to add in a PCIe card with SATA-III.

PCIe 2.0 x1 offers 500MB/s (5Gbps) - not enough for SATA-III (6Gbps), but more than SATA-II (3Gbps). An x2 card would offer 1GB/s (10Gbps), so you could easily get everything out of one SSD. With trying to copy from one SSD to another, they would need to split that so you'd not be able to do that at full speed but very close to it. For all intents and purposes, a PCIe 2.0 x2 controller would give you the ability to use multiple SSDs without limits.

All you'd need to know is the connectivity on your motherboard. x2 slots are very uncommon, so my guess is your board has an x16 slot, several x1 slots, and probably an x16 slot which has the ability to run at up to x8, and perhaps an x16 slot that can run at up to x4. Obviously you'll need to use your x4 or x8 slot in order to support such a card. An x2 card won't physically fit in an x1 slot, unless the slot has an open end. However, it would obviously only run at x1 which offers you not that much more than the SATA-II ports on your board (I mean, you can get higher transfer rates between the drive and your system RAM, eg, with loading programs, but with transferring from one drive to another it would not be any better.)

 

[Sugar Kaine Mostly]

...

Thank you Joexx.

I have the Gigabyte GA-X58A-OC

I am already using the two SATA III ports (Marvell) in RAID 0 mode for my two 2TB Barracuda XT's (4TB), so I no longer have SATA III available for my SSD's. This is why I need a PCIe card offering SATA III, and if I'm going to buy one, I want to buy a quality performance card.

 

[drtweak]

I would move your HDD RAID 0 to a RAID card. Even if they are SATA II no way those two drives can max out a SATA II port.

I just upgrade my media server from 3 drives to 7. This is what I have.

RAID 0 2 x2Tb (Main Video drive
2 x RAID 0 2 x1TB (Documents and Anime)
1 2TB Drive (Music)

I have backups for everything so not worried about the RAID 0 but I just got a LSI MegaRAID 8888 RAID card. yes it is still SATA II and is a 4x Card based on PCIe 1.0 which gives me 1GBps is still way more than I will ever need.

The SSD's on the other hand is best if you can find a PCIe 3.0 Raid card. VERY FEW RAID cards or SATA Cards come in 1x. Most are 4x card giving you plenty of bandwith.

If you plan on getting a SATA card for all those other SSD's you are talking about and working with 4K best to look for a PCIe 3.0 4x or higher RAID/SATA Card.