Question regarding PCIe bandwidth

[Drezdun]

I have recently ordered a new NVME cache drive (to replace the aging sata ssd drive my server currently uses) as well as a PCI adapter card (pictured) and a 2.5gb nic card (pictured) to take advantage of the 1.5gb fiber internet connection i have.

My server is fairly old, only has PCIe 2.0 slots.  I am not that versed in how fast each PCIe standard is in regards to how many lanes this Network card and adapter card will use.  As far as i understand it PCIe 2.0 is 500 MB/s per lane? but how many lanes do each of these cards utilize, the physical connector on them looks really small.  

 

The server has a Supermicro H8DG6/H8DGi motherboard with dual Opteron 6380 cpu's 

 

 

 

 

Here is my current layout:

 

Slot 6 - 1660 Super for hardware transcoding in plex

Slot 5 - 1660 Super

Slot 4 - Empty

Slot 3 - LSI HBA

Slot 2 - Empty

Slot 1 - Empty

 

Was Thinking i would put the network card into slot 1 and the Nvme SSD adapter into slot 2.  Will these cards be limited in this configuration? 

 

Attached to this post are pictures of the network card and nvme adapter card

 

 

Thank you to anyone who can advise me with this!
 

 

 

[whispous]

At PCIe 2.0 age, the server may not support NVMe storage.

[Electronics Wizardy]

12 minutes ago, Drezdun said:

My server is fairly old, only has PCIe 2.0 slots.  I am not that versed in how fast each PCIe standard is in regards to how many lanes this Network card and adapter card will use.  As far as i understand it PCIe 2.0 is 500 MB/s per lane? but how many lanes do each of these cards utilize, the physical connector on them looks really small.  

 

The network card is a x1, and pcie bandwidth will be fine her.e

 

The m.2 adapter is a x4, so its going to limit the speed of gen 3 or faster nvme drives. But this likely won't matter for most caching uses(your probably not gonna see an improvement from the sata ssd anyways.

[Electronics Wizardy]

1 minute ago, whispous said:

At PCIe 2.0 age, the server may not support NVMe storage.

As long as its not the boot drive, nvme drives work just fine, and work just fine. I have used many a nvme drive on pentium 4 and very old pcie systems without issue.

[Drezdun]

2 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

The network card is a x1, and pcie bandwidth will be fine her.e

 

The m.2 adapter is a x4, so its going to limit the speed of gen 3 or faster nvme drives. But this likely won't matter for most caching uses(your probably not gonna see an improvement from the sata ssd anyways.

Yeah the drive i ordered (i should have included that in my original post) is a Western Digital 500GB WD Red SN700 NVMe Internal Solid State Drive SSD for NAS Devices - Gen3 PCIe, M.2 2280, Up to 3,430 MB/s - WDS500G1R0C

How much of a limit are we talking here? Im assuming that even though its limited it still should be a fair bit faster than the existing sata SSD im using? I'd like to be able to download my linux ISO's at the max line speed coming in from my ISP (so around 1.7Gbps) in addition to hopefully faster post processing, unzipping files, moving files and maybe slightly faster docker performance.

[Electronics Wizardy]

11 minutes ago, Drezdun said:

Yeah the drive i ordered (i should have included that in my original post) is a Western Digital 500GB WD Red SN700 NVMe Internal Solid State Drive SSD for NAS Devices - Gen3 PCIe, M.2 2280, Up to 3,430 MB/s - WDS500G1R0C

How much of a limit are we talking here? Im assuming that even though its limited it still should be a fair bit faster than the existing sata SSD im using? I'd like to be able to download my linux ISO's at the max line speed coming in from my ISP (so around 1.7Gbps) in addition to hopefully faster post processing, unzipping files, moving files and maybe slightly faster docker performance.

What caching program/os/filesystem are you using?

 

Your looking at about a 2000mB/s limit.

 

But I'd guess there won't be a significant speed increase going from a sata ssd to nvme for caching.

 

 

[Drezdun]

5 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

What caching program/os/filesystem are you using?

 

Your looking at about a 2000mB/s limit.

 

But I'd guess there won't be a significant speed increase going from a sata ssd to nvme for caching.

 

 

I’m using Unraid, sabnzbd, Medusa, and xfs file system on the array btrfs on the cache drive 

[Electronics Wizardy]

3 minutes ago, Drezdun said:

I’m using Unraid, sabnzbd, Medusa, and xfs file system on the array btrfs on the cache drive 

Unraids cache drive is writes only. So it won't help with unzipping or anything that needs faster read speeds. 

 

If your goal is faster speeds using something like ZFS or more traditional raid will make this much faster as unraid is almost limited to the speed of a single drive.

 

 

Either way, a SATA ssd should be plenty fast here, and I don't think nvme would help

[Drezdun]

9 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Unraids cache drive is writes only. So it won't help with unzipping or anything that needs faster read speeds. 

 

If your goal is faster speeds using something like ZFS or more traditional raid will make this much faster as unraid is almost limited to the speed of a single drive.

 

 

Either way, a SATA ssd should be plenty fast here, and I don't think nvme would help

Ahh boo that kinda stinks. Good to know though! At the very least I needed to switch to a nvme drive on an adapter to free up a drive sled on the front of the server. It’s fully populated right now so ditching the ssd cache out of a front drive sled will allow me to add another hard drive. 
 

appreciate all your help. This forum is awesome. All my questions answered in under an hour tonight, crazy!