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Bandwidth of PCIe x1 SATA Expansion Card

Carl DaBeast
By Carl DaBeast
in Storage Devices
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Go to solution Solved by jaslion,
7 minutes ago, Carl DaBeast said:

The motherboard for my unRAID server has 6 SATA ports, but I missed the fine print that said that two of them share bandwidth with an m.2 slot that I'm using for an SSD cache drive.

 

I've seen some SATA Expansion cards that fit in a PCIe 1x slot with 4 SATA ports (link) but I'm wondering if it's a good idea to use one of these.

 

Is there enough bandwidth for a PCIe 1x slot to support 4 HDDs?

 

I would probably never be pulling data from all 4 drives simultaneously, but I also wouldn't want it to be bottlenecked, you know, just because.

A 3.0 x1 slot is 935MB/S so plenty enough. It's faster than sata 3.

Posted

The motherboard for my unRAID server has 6 SATA ports, but I missed the fine print that said that two of them share bandwidth with an m.2 slot that I'm using for an SSD cache drive.

 

I've seen some SATA Expansion cards that fit in a PCIe 1x slot with 4 SATA ports (link) but I'm wondering if it's a good idea to use one of these.

 

Is there enough bandwidth for a PCIe 1x slot to support 4 HDDs?

 

I would probably never be pulling data from all 4 drives simultaneously, but I also wouldn't want it to be bottlenecked, you know, just because.

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7 minutes ago, Carl DaBeast said:

The motherboard for my unRAID server has 6 SATA ports, but I missed the fine print that said that two of them share bandwidth with an m.2 slot that I'm using for an SSD cache drive.

 

I've seen some SATA Expansion cards that fit in a PCIe 1x slot with 4 SATA ports (link) but I'm wondering if it's a good idea to use one of these.

 

Is there enough bandwidth for a PCIe 1x slot to support 4 HDDs?

 

I would probably never be pulling data from all 4 drives simultaneously, but I also wouldn't want it to be bottlenecked, you know, just because.

A 3.0 x1 slot is 935MB/S so plenty enough. It's faster than sata 3.

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17 minutes ago, jaslion said:

A 3.0 x1 slot is 935MB/S so plenty enough. It's faster than sata 3.

Ah, I think I was finding the bandwidth of pcie 1.0 instead of 3.0 x1.

 

Thanks for the help!

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I run a similar card in my unraid setup... for my purposes, I don't notice and performance issues. But I rarely hit more than one drive at a time ever. I'm sure in more intensive I/O tasks, the card will shit the bed. 

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but what motherboard do you have and with what CPU, and to which PCIe port do you want to plug the adapter?
Like you assumed that it was PCI-e 3.0, but lots of not so old motherboard have PCIe x1 only in  2.0 PCIe standard from chipset.

   
 
 
 
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