PCI vs PCIe Sata controller card

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TaranScorp

Senior member
Oct 13, 2009
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At first I wanted to get a PCI sata controller card and after reading that it will limit the Sata-II speed because of the 33mhz bus. Now I am wondering if a PCIe Sata controller card might allow the Sata-II hard drive reach it's potential. I have a PCI Express x4 slot with a graphics card in it but I can take it out and use my AGP slot with another card I have which is AGP.
OK, will the PCIex4 give me that much more speed then the PCI slot?
I want to run two Samsung F3 500gb drives.

Thanks
 
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pjkenned

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Jan 14, 2008
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www.servethehome.com
Get PCIe for two reasons. First, the PCI bus runs at around 133MB/s IIRC (plus or minus). A modern 7,200rpm disk can saturate that. Second, more and more motherboards have PCIe slots, if you want to connect more than two drives to that system, or a future system, then a PCIe HBA is probably a better investment.

I've relegated PCI slots to Intel Pro/1000 GT (single) duty at this point.
 
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TaranScorp

Senior member
Oct 13, 2009
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I found this card but it's a little expensive for me, sheeesh it cost's more the the two Samsungs HD's I want to get.

HighPoint RocketRAID 2310 PCI Express x4 SATA II Controller Card.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...-027-_-Product.

Is there any other cards similiar but cheaper?
Also can these controller cards be run as non-raid?
I just want two independent drives.
 
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TaranScorp

Senior member
Oct 13, 2009
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That's a great price but it's a PCIe x1 card, what speeds are you getting with two Sata-II hard drives? I wanted to try to use a PCIE x4 card to get the max sppeds you can get out of two Sata-II drives. Maybe a PCIe x1 card won't slow down the two hard drives that much?
 
poofyhairguy

poofyhairguy

Lifer
Nov 20, 2005
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TaranScorp said:
That's a great price but it's a PCIe x1 card, what speeds are you getting with two Sata-II hard drives? I wanted to try to use a PCIE x4 card to get the max sppeds you can get out of two Sata-II drives. Maybe a PCIe x1 card won't slow down the two hard drives that much?
Click to expand...

Good question. My SSD benchmarks in non-raid are equal to the same drive with my best ICH10R mobo. But lets go to wikipedia for a good answer:

PCIe 1.0, with a data rate of 250 MB/s
Click to expand...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCI_Express#PCI_Express_1.0

So almost twice as fast as PCI. Not as good as the card you linked by any means, but much cheaper....
 
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TaranScorp

Senior member
Oct 13, 2009
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If two drives have average read speeds of 112mb/s and 200mb/s burst speed then would both drives work at
112mb/s on a 250mb/s PCIe x1 card?
 
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mv2devnull

Golden Member
Apr 13, 2010
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Kenazo said:
Hmm... I've never tried setting up a RAID across multiple controllers.
Click to expand...
That is actually a redundancy technique. If one controller breaks, it effectively looks like all drives on that controller breaking, but the arrays might still remain operational (depending on layout of the arrays).

And naturally it is a performance optimization as well, spreading the traffic over multiple channels/buses.
 
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TaranScorp

Senior member
Oct 13, 2009
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When I get my Pcie sata controller card what do I leave the settings in my bios for
Pcie Downstream Pipeline and Pcie VC1 Request Queue? Enabled or disabled?
Are they settings just for graphics?
Thanks
 
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