Storage question... Sata II vs Sata III vs PCIe card vs USB3... gulp...

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hazio123

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Feb 19, 2013
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Hi all,

I'm going through a storage upgrade process at the moment and I'm trying to figure out what my best option is right now. Here's where I'm at:

My motherboard has:
1x SATA III (6GBPS) - currently with a SSD/boot drive
3x SATA II (3GBPS) - currently with 2x 2TB HDD (6GBPS) & DVD drive/writer.
2x PCIe X1 (?) - spare
2x USB3 external - spare

I've just bought a new 4TB drive and I'd like to RAID (or windows storage group thing) the other 2x2TB drives listed above to create a backup but I'm now out of SATA ports.

Other than buying a new mobo, what will get me the quickest data speeds...do I:

- Buy a PCIeX1 SATA card (2/4port? and what speed? 6gb? 3gb?)...I fear PCIe isn't quick enough to utilise a fast card/drive...
- Buy the above PCIe card, plug in the DVD drive and use the now spare 3GB SATA port for my new drive
- Buy an external USB3 raid/nas (would rather the drives stay inside the machine)

Am I right in thinking that spinning disks won't utilise a 6GB SATA connection even though they may be geared up for it?

Help please...
Thanks in advance.
 
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I'd get a small, cheap PCIe SATA card and stick the DVD drive on it. (That's exactly what I did at work when I needed to fit 4 DVD burners for bulk-burning recently, although that was a 4-port PCI card because it was much cheaper than a PCIe one and you only need about 25MB/s per drive for DVD anyway, well within the capabilities of a 66MHz PCI slot.)

The fastest SATA hard drives can't saturate a SATA II 3Gbps port (300MB/s) or a single PCIe 1.0 lane (250MB/s) so you don't have to worry about that even if you do decide to keep the DVD drive on the motherboard and hang a single disk off a PCIe card. With multiple disks on the card, you might have to think about PCIe 2.0 and/or multiple lanes, though.
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molletts

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Jun 16, 2009
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I'd get a small, cheap PCIe SATA card and stick the DVD drive on it. (That's exactly what I did at work when I needed to fit 4 DVD burners for bulk-burning recently, although that was a 4-port PCI card because it was much cheaper than a PCIe one and you only need about 25MB/s per drive for DVD anyway, well within the capabilities of a 66MHz PCI slot.)

The fastest SATA hard drives can't saturate a SATA II 3Gbps port (300MB/s) or a single PCIe 1.0 lane (250MB/s) so you don't have to worry about that even if you do decide to keep the DVD drive on the motherboard and hang a single disk off a PCIe card. With multiple disks on the card, you might have to think about PCIe 2.0 and/or multiple lanes, though.
 
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