MB with 3 onboard Intel SATA III ? (and RAID1 for two HDD)

Toggle sidebar Toggle sidebar
J

jochenthomas

Junior Member
Oct 6, 2012
9
0
0
Hi,
is there any motherboard which has 3 x SATAIII onboard (best Intel SATAIII AHCI or similar, but never Marvell etc.) which works together with [FONT=&quot]Intel Core i7 3770T (low power CPU).

My aim is to build up a virtualized environment with VmWare Workstation (only small business!!, no expensive virtualization like Fusion or Citrix etc.).

Therefore I would like to use:
1 x SSD as boot disk (most likely LINUX)
2 x HDD with RAID1 configured (3 TB streamline HDD 24/7)

But I can't find a motherboard (with vt-x or vt-d support) which has 3 onboard Intel SATAIII (you can only find such ineffective ones with Marvell RAID controller) .
If there are any suggestion, please let me know :) Thanks in advance.
[/FONT]
 
H

hhhd1

Senior member
Apr 8, 2012
667
3
71
Sata2 or Sata3 are not going to make a difference, specially if connected with harddisks that do not even achieve maximum Sata2 speeds.
 
H

hhhd1

Senior member
Apr 8, 2012
667
3
71
why do you need vt-d support ?

Make sure that the motherboard bios support it officially, because I heard that some Asus and Gigabyte motherboards do not support it.
 
J

jochenthomas

Junior Member
Oct 6, 2012
9
0
0
The HDD which is expected to be used will be a "[FONT=&quot]Constellation ES.2 ST33000650NS".

O.k. vt-d support is currently not that important, but we will see in the future what Microsoft is going to do... but without any doubt - important is virtualization support.

..."[/FONT][FONT=&quot]do not support it": And that's exact the issue, a MB which supports most of the mentioned features and esp. the SATAIII RAID + another Boot SSD (SATAIII) :)





[/FONT]
 
S

sequoia464

Senior member
Feb 12, 2003
870
0
71
Not positive, but I think that Intel only has 2 sata III ports period.

Because of my SSD's I was looking into this a while back.
 
tweakboy

tweakboy

Diamond Member
Jan 3, 2010
9,517
2
81
www.hammiestudios.com
hhhd1 said:
Just saw this:
http://www.storagereview.com/seagate_constellation2_and_constellation_es2_hard_drive_review

sata2 speed = ~250 mb/s
sata3 speed = ~500 mb/s

The disk doesn't appear to do more than ~150 mb/s.

I wouldn't worry that much about the interface that is going to be used.
Click to expand...


Well ya that is exactly SSD speeds avg. He has hard drives. man you dont need sata 3 cuz is your hard drive sata 3 ? If so youll get 135mbps or 140mbps. Compared to 100mbps of sata2. like hdd11 said listen to him. GL
 
H

hhhd1

Senior member
Apr 8, 2012
667
3
71
Another option would be to put the OS drive on SATA 2, still there is not real performance difference in real world.

SATA 3 is overrated anyway, its only noticable when doing data transfer between drives that are able to read/write at more than 250 mb/s
 
J

jochenthomas

Junior Member
Oct 6, 2012
9
0
0
Hey, thanks for your comments,
- the hdd is a SATA 6Gbps, SAS 6Gbps
- according to the mentioned review (many thanks hhhd1): Weak performance of the 3TB Constellation ES.2 SAS drive - ...puh, really bad news
- so it seems to be not the best performing drive? and I thought the hdd would not be too bad :-(
- and yes I belive this is true (sequoia464): Intel only has 2 sata III ports period -> at least I wasn't able to find something different with more than two ports

So -over all- this means to look for another streamline hdd which is faster (but not too expensive)??
I feel not comfortable with the option to put the ssd on a sata2 port. Why: the virtual boxes (virtual machines) I would like to copy on start to the SSD to get the needed speed, the RAID should be esp. used for the data to store and to backup the VM's
And the RAID option is mostly on the sata3.

So, any other idea for the streamline (24/7) drive or a good motherboard?
Would appreciate some ideas to get a different view.
 
Cerb

Cerb

Elite Member
Aug 26, 2000
17,484
33
86
jochenthomas said:
Hey, thanks for your comments,
- the hdd is a SATA 6Gbps, SAS 6Gbps
Click to expand...
It can't come close to using it. It just supports it as an interface speed. You don't need SATA 6Gbps just because it will happen to work. OTOH, most 6Gbps-supporting SSDs can actually use the added bandwidth on occasion.

So -over all- this means to look for another streamline hdd which is faster (but not too expensive)??
Click to expand...
That depends. What are those 3TBs doing?
 
H

hhhd1

Senior member
Apr 8, 2012
667
3
71
I don't remember seeing mechanical disks that are able to do above sata2 speeds.

IMO, this is what I would do: connect the SSD to the SATA3, and put the 2 mechanical disks on SATA2 ports and do some software raid using the OS that is going to be put on the SSD.

whether it is windows or linux, both supports doing software raid.

A thing about SATA2 vs SATA3 speeds, the only noticeable difference is when doing file transfers, operating systems are only affected by random access speeds and random access time, which will be the same for both interfaces.
 
S

smangular

Senior member
Nov 11, 2010
347
0
0
Smoblikat said:
Completely and laughably wrong.
Click to expand...

Yep, its on the motherboard it must be fast :)

Even some onboard devices have pcie x1 connections due to design choices which limit performance causing onboard devices in cases to be slower than a dedicated pcie x4 card.
 
J

jochenthomas

Junior Member
Oct 6, 2012
9
0
0
Sorry,
was some days on the road.
Thanks for the comments. I understand best way is to have onboard controller and it's enough to put the HDD's on SATA2 because of speed limitations and the SSD on SATA3.
Thanks again, I will do it this way...
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

TRENDING THREADS

COMPANY
RESOURCES
FOLLOW
Top Bottom