Originally posted by: Lord Evermore
Originally posted by: RaiderJ
Currently I'm using a regular PCI RAID 5 card (Intel) for a 4 drive array. I've considered upgrading to a PCI-e card, but I wasn't sure exactly how to connect it.
If I purchased an SLI motherboard, could I use one 16x slot for the graphics card and the other for the RAID card? Or do you need a special motherboard?
The primary slot is dedicated to graphics, but the second slot can be used for any PCIe card. The 1220 is an x8 PCIe card, so even a board which only uses 8 lanes for each of the slots would work, if the x8 for the graphics card wouldn't be an issue for you.
You don't necessarily need an SLI board though. An x1 slot has 500MBps of bandwidth. A 4 drive array of SATA 1.5GB drives has theoretical throughput of 600MBps, so you'd only be somewhat limiting the maximum burst rates (ignoring the transfer rate of cache on the card), and sustained transfer might be only half the x1 bandwidth. If you got a board with an x4 slot electrically (2GBps), you'd have more than enough bandwidth even for an 8-drive array. Many boards have a slot that is x16 physically, but only supplies 4 lanes of bandwidth; PCIe design requires cards to be compatible with any combination of lanes, as long as the slot is physically at least as large as the card. The Areca 1220 is only an x8 physical card, so even an x8 physical/x4 electrical slot will work fine, and the card will negotiate with the chipset and run at x4 speeds.
Of course the theoretical throughput to SATA 3GB drives is more than an x4 slot can handle, but that's again back to the burst rates. I expect the rates to the on-card cache would still exceed the x4 bandwidth but I don't know by how much.