Adding SATA2 ports to an HP xw8200 Workstation

[Phillip Chapman]

I have an HP xw8200 Workstation that’s several years old. It appears to have two SATA1 ports on the motherboard. I need to add a minimum of two more SATA2 ports with a PCI-Express card. I plan on installing four internal hard drives in the system.

My question is if I’m running SATA2 hard drives which will be faster, going with the motherboard (SATA1) or running off the PCI-Express card (SATA2, the card will likely limit the speed to around 140 mbps). If it is indeed the PCI-Express card, should I consider putting all four drivers on the PCI-Express Card and none on the motherboard?

Let me know what input you have as far as the optimal configuration under these circumstances.

 

[vibe]

The data transfer rate will be faster off of the Sata2 PCI card however you may will have problems trying to boot from these drives.

I'd also dout that the bottleneck in the read/write speeds is caused by only having a sata1 port - these ports still out perform most hard drives.

 

[Phillip Chapman]

Thanks for the confirmation. That’s what I suspected.

So currently, I’ll probably have this arrangement:

WD Raptor 74 gb (Boot disk, SATA1 on motherboard)
WD Cavier Black 1 tb (SATA2 on PCI card)
WD Cavier Black 1 tb (SATA2 on PCI card)
WD Cavier Green 1 tb (SATA1 on motherboard)

Probably in the next year or so, I’ll swap out the WD Raptor boot disk for a SSD drive at which time I’ll evaluate running that off the SATA2 card as the extra speed would likely be more noticeable with a SSD drive.

Does this sound like a logical plan?

 

[vibe]

WD Raptor 74 - do you mean the new velocor raptors? Old Raptors are a think of the past, you can get 99% of the performance for 50% the price from a modern 7200 drive.

Upgrade to SSD will depend on system spec/what you use it for and budget - plus what comes out from now until then. If you're using a mobo with only 2 sarta1 ports - my guess would be the money spent on SSD could be better put towards other parts.

V