Question Any Idea if x570 SATA ports use shared Bandwitch?

Mr.Vegas

Junior Member
Nov 5, 2018
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Hi,
I heard somewhere that on board SATA ports have shared bandwitch, meaning if I fill all of them they speed is reduced.
Im in tad of a situation, I need to connect 8 Samsung 850 PRO SSDs which have 520 even 530MB's sequential write speed. [x4 512GB a d x4 1Tb, ill do windows RAID0 for each]
I have 4 on board SATA ports [plus 2 assmedia but they dont count]
And I have a nice PCIe Gen 3.0 x8 2-Port HBA card that supports 8 SATA drives, BUT the only free PCIe slot I have is Gen 3.0 x4 so thats 4GB/s of total bandwidth [x8 x 520MB/s = 4160MB/s]

Kinda logical to connect 4 to mobo and 4 to card, but if its true that on board sata has shared bandwitch like say connected to PCIe x1, then maybe having all of them connected to the card and just losing 160MB/s total is not bad
 

nosurprises

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Jan 4, 2021
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You can check the specific motherboard manufacturer, but I have not heard of this. I have an ASUS X570 and it specifically says it supports 8 x SATA 6Gb/s ports. It didn't say it supports 6Gbps only if I use half of the ports.
 

Insert_Nickname

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May 6, 2012
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Why bother with RAID'ed SATA drives anymore? A single high performance PCIe 4.0 NVMe drive will outperform your whole array, and is a whole lot simpler.

For simple bulk storage a single, or two in RAID1, HDD is way cheaper.
 
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Soulkeeper

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Ultimately everything going through the x570 will share the same pcie 4.0 x4 bandwidth.
That would include the native onboard sata and any added sata (asmedia) that uses one of the "pick one".

The only way around this would be to use only enough sata drives to not saturate this bandwidth. Then put the rest on a pcie card/slot that uses the CPU's pcie lanes.

2GB/s per lane per direction x4.
8GB/s read 8GB/s write constant, minus anything the other chipset components take from that(usb, network, etc.) and any overhead loss.

A rough estimate would say a dozen of those drives should be ok.
As suggested above, check your motherboard manual to see how they are routing everything. Or if certain things are disabled or reduced in speed if other things are used.
 
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aigomorla

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Kinda logical to connect 4 to mobo and 4 to card,

im fairly confident you have very little knowledge what a nVME is suggesting you can put 8 on a x570 and not a threadripper platform, because you will be SEVERLY PCI-E lanes limited after adding a GPU even running at 8x.

Infact im pretty sure 5000 series ryzens can not even support 40 x pci-e lanes required for 8 x nvme's + GPU.

Why bother with RAID'ed SATA drives anymore?

because i can throw SATA SSD's on R0 dedicated just for games and not use any PCI-E Lanes for storage while netting close speeds.
3 x R0 SSD's nets almost the same load times as a single nVME, and R0 will effectively double/triple the write life on the SSDs in array by the # of drives.
 
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Insert_Nickname

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because i can throw SATA SSD's on R0 dedicated just for games and not use any PCI-E Lanes for storage while netting close speeds.
3 x R0 SSD's nets almost the same load times as a single nVME, and R0 will effectively double/triple the write life on the SSDs in array by the # of drives.

3x SATA is still slower then even a last gen PCIe NVMe drive. You'll only get about 1500MB/s and perhaps 200000IOPS out of such a RAID0 setup, while adding complexity, and sacrificing reliability. Even a lowish SN550 is capable of more.

Drive life isn't an argument anymore. My new 2TB SN550 has a TBW rating of 900TB(!). I doubt I'll ever reach that. The great endurance experiment back in '15 showed even 250GB drives were capable of at least 700 TBW, the 840 Pro lasted to 2.4PBW, and this has 8x the NAND.

my 2c worth of opinion... :cool:
 
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aigomorla

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3x SATA is still slower then even a last gen PCIe NVMe drive. You'll only get about 1500MB/s and perhaps 200000IOPS out of such a RAID0 setup, while adding complexity, and sacrificing reliability. Even a lowish SN550 is capable of more.

This is theoretical... not actual. Actual load times in games is not impacted that much in regards to max IOPs.
You asked where SATA should even be bothered with RAID, and i will give you an example to proof here.


Actual you see it gets close with 2, and with 3 it gets even more close, and 3 is about the theoretically limit on the SATA.
 
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Insert_Nickname

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You asked where SATA should even be bothered with RAID, and i will give you an example to proof here.

What proof? All I see is a 128GB 600p*, which is about as slow as an NVMe drive is going to get due to very little NAND and a 1st gen controller. It's still faster then RAID0 SATA.

Try the same with a Samsung 980 PRO, and you might get different results.

*I actually have a 128GB 6000p (same drive, but for embedded usage), and a 512GB 600p. The 512GB is a definite step up from SATA.
 

aigomorla

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if i need to argue with you on the fact that nVME offer very little benefit on games over a SATA SSD, and raiding the SSD to get a smaller gap between them, i have nothing more i need to say as its plastered all throughout youtube, on just what little benefits a nVME has over a SATA SSD in general even without RAID.
 

CP5670

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I have never noticed any speed difference between my nvme and sata drives. I tend to keep hard drives in use for 10+ years, and prefer to buy nvme since it will be the norm in the future. At the same time though, my Z490 board only has 2 nvme slots and both are filled, and adding a PCIE nvme card would obstruct the video card's airflow.
 

aigomorla

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Z490 board only has 2 nvme slots and both are filled, and adding a PCIE nvme card would obstruct the video card's airflow.

i would be more urked about being limited 24 pci-e lanes on a z490.
If you have the spare pci-e lanes, im all down for using nVME's... but you can never have enough pci-e lanes until you go up to ThreadRipper, as i feel even intel's HEDT is limited at 48-lanes.

But this is my gamer side rumbling.. as i have OCD on running my GPU's at 8x and not 16x, i used to be an avid SLI/Xfire adopter, so the new platforms and being limited pci-e lanes really hit me the most from old school PC building.

But again, a normal consumer probably would not worry about counting PCI-E lanes.
 

Insert_Nickname

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and raiding the SSD to get a smaller gap between them

I genuinely do not understand why people cling to RAID0 for regular desktop use. It was and is a sub-optimal solution especially when SSD exist. You can at least make a case for RAID1, for fault tolerance. But RAID0?

Larger capacity SSDs within a family also perform better, due to more physical NAND. Which makes RAID0 even more pointless. Want more capacity? Buy a larger single drive.

Just for the record, I did RAID0 WD Raptors before SSD were a thing. But there wasn't any alternatives for high performance drives back then.
 

aigomorla

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I genuinely do not understand why people cling to RAID0 for regular desktop use. It was and is a sub-optimal solution especially when SSD exist. You can at least make a case for RAID1, for fault tolerance. But RAID0?

Larger capacity SSDs within a family also perform better, due to more physical NAND. Which makes RAID0 even more pointless. Want more capacity? Buy a larger single drive.

Just for the record, I did RAID0 WD Raptors before SSD were a thing. But there wasn't any alternatives for high performance drives back then.

because its games.. i said dedicated GAME drive.
And again i said because you save your PCI-E Lanes over nVME's.
PCI-E lanes are not infinite, and you have SATA ports so you may as well utilize it, and R0 them under Microsoft storage space.

This is also again a GAME drive, who cares about fault tollerance... even saved games are cloud saved, It just needs to load and run the game.
Raid0 also effectively doubles the life by the number of drives in the array as well, and again with games doing save files every 5-10 minutes, thats a LOT of writes when your playing a 100+hour campaign.

And i raid with larger cap drives.
These to be exact:
20201202-230338.jpg


However i ran into another problem.... getting SSD's higher then 4TB in SATA outside nVME is just ridiculously expensive.

And with games today getting as large as 120GB (mass effect Legendary)
I really hope 15.4TB of game storage will be enough to spread across (Epic + Steam + Origin + Bnet + GoG)
 

Insert_Nickname

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And again i said because you save your PCI-E Lanes over nVME's.
PCI-E lanes are not infinite, and you have SATA ports so you may as well utilize it, and R0 them under Microsoft storage space.

Save PCIe lanes? Why? They're there to be used.

Just how many drives does a "gaming" PC need? 1? 2? 10? For bulk storage HDDs are still way cheaper.

This is also again a GAME drive, who cares about fault tollerance... even saved games are cloud saved, It just needs to load and run the game.

Have fun re-downloading a couple of TB's worth of games, because one drive failed. Even just reloading from a spinner is going to be limited at the HDDs read speed.

I can see we're on different opinions. I'm out.
 

aigomorla

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Just how many drives does a "gaming" PC need? 1? 2? 10? For bulk storage HDDs are still way cheaper.

You tell me when games again are averaging 100GB per title and only going up.
Also bulk storage drives again is NOT GAMES.
I specifically said GAMES.. if not for games, then absolutely do not R0, and use some form of fault tollerance, but games.... i have not seen many people rage cry and rush off to data recovery because a game folder drive died unless it was a multipurpose use drive with other DATA.

And yes we got different opinions... i like to use a tomato in salad and your suggesting cucumbers, so its a view in different objective and tastes.

But this is what i recommend when someone says "Gaming PC" + "Gaming File Storage"

If they say gaming PC + Movies.. i usually tell them.... PC1: Gaming PC. PC2: NAS :p

Have fun re-downloading a couple of TB's worth of games

...

Doesn't bother me too much... ive actually done it a few times as i keep upgrading my array in storage cap.
It also helps have a fast internet connection with low latency. With today's internet speeds, its really not that bad, unless its 0 day and the servers are overloaded like what always happens to EA.

(but again, its not something i do every month... at most once a year, and not because of hardware failures. )
Capture.png


Here is how fast i download from Steam:
Capture.jpg


Epic:
epic-downloader.jpg
 
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