SATA add-in cards - question

[htwingnut]

I have a Windows Home Server. I currently have a PCI SATA add-in card that can support up to four SATA drives. I will not use it for four SATA drives though because the PCI bus maxes at 133MB/s. I also have my Intel gigabit NIC in a PCI slot. So don't want to saturate the PCI bus.

I am looking to add two more SATA ports to my system. Will there be any issues running two SATA controller cards, one PCI, the other PCI-e? I am also considering a four port PCI-e x4 SATA card which should be able to manage four hard drives without issue on the bus, but it's considerably more expensive than a two port PCI-e x1 SATA card. I don't want to RAID anything, just add more SATA ports. If I went with two cards, both would be using Silicon Image chips.

My motherboard has two PCI slots, a single PCI-e x16 slot, and a single PCI-e x1 slot.

 

[mnewsham]

You SHOULDNT have problems but the fact is you might, i would advise going with the 4 port card and switching all your HDD's over to that.

 

[htwingnut]

Thanks. The more I thought about it, the more I considered that. I don't NEED the two extra ports right now, so I guess I can shop for a decent deal. I even realized that I have a DVD drive using a SATA port, so will remove that, and replace with an IDE drive, I think I have one laying around anyhow.

 

[VirtualLarry]

I have a Windows Home Server. I currently have a PCI SATA add-in card that can support up to four SATA drives. I will not use it for four SATA drives though because the PCI bus maxes at 133MB/s. I also have my Intel gigabit NIC in a PCI slot. So don't want to saturate the PCI bus.

Honestly, you probably don't need to worry about that. The PCI bus load-balances the bandwidth, so one device won't hog it.

I would use all 4 ports on that PCI card without worries.

Edit: In fact, if you have a spare PCI-E x1 slot, that's where I would put a gigabit NIC. And then throw in another identical 4-port PCI SATA card if you needed more drives.

 

[mfenn]

PCI is a shared bus, so you want to either get the NIC or the SATA ports off it. With both devices hanging off the PCI bus, you're looking at a max sustained transfer rate of 66MB/s (two hops).