SAS cards?

[Dorkenstein]

I've only seen SAS adapter cards for PCI-X, which my motherboard doesn't have. Are there any other types?

 

[Qianglong]

there are sas card for the PCI Express but you have to make sure you mobo supports non-graphics add-in card in the PCI Express 16 slot

 

[Dorkenstein]

Ah ok, it's not the shorter PCI-e slot then, its the big one for graphics cards. Guess I am out of luck, only have one of those and its full. Thanks.

 

[Fallen Kell]

There are PCI-E cards that work...Areca ARC-1210/1220/1230/1240 and other models. I am personally looking at getting the ARC-1220 for my next build. I believe it will work even in a PCI-E 1x slot as long as the slot itself doesn't put a physical block to keep larger cards (4x, 8x, 16x physical slot) cards from fitting (sometimes the board layout has other components that would interfere if using one of those cards in the small 1x slot like a capacitor or heatsink or sometime, and they put an extention of the retaining wall on the slot to make the wall thicker on the one side so that it is wider then the specifications for the width of the space placed on the larger 4x, 8x, or 16x physical conections. The motherboard will normally note it in the manual if you can only use a 1x card for the slot).

You will be limited in bandwidth, but the performance will still be pretty good, since a 1x PCI-E slot is given 200MBps duplex dedicated bandwidth and the whole of the normal PCI bus only has 127.2 MBps simplex bandwidth shared across all devices and not including any communications overhead. The 200MBps duplex for the 1x PCI-E is the actual data rate, including the overhead it transfers 250 MBps...

So in other words, it has a lot of space for you to add drives even if you only have a 1x slot to use. A 4x slot is more then capabile for a 4 disk RAID as there is no performance increase by going up to an 8x slot from a 4x slot.

 

[imported_Tick]

Originally posted by: Fallen Kell
There are PCI-E cards that work...Areca ARC-1210/1220/1230/1240 and other models. I am personally looking at getting the ARC-1220 for my next build. I believe it will work even in a PCI-E 1x slot as long as the slot itself doesn't put a physical block to keep larger cards (4x, 8x, 16x physical slot) cards from fitting (sometimes the board layout has other components that would interfere if using one of those cards in the small 1x slot like a capacitor or heatsink or sometime, and they put an extention of the retaining wall on the slot to make the wall thicker on the one side so that it is wider then the specifications for the width of the space placed on the larger 4x, 8x, or 16x physical conections. The motherboard will normally note it in the manual if you can only use a 1x card for the slot).

q]

I do believe the word on 2CPU forum is that most cards will work on a 4x slot, but not bellow that.