SATA: What plugs in where?

wireman_58

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I have some HDDs that will be used as raid5, and a SSD, and a DVD. Unfortunately, there are not enough SATA ports on the mainboard. So I bought a PCIe SATA card (Asrock). Should I plug the SSD into it? Or one of the HDDs of the raid5? Or maybe the DVD? In other words, should I use the PCIe card for the fastest or the slowest stuff?
 

wireman_58

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Oops, sorry if I said something stupid. Glad you are here to correct my faulty thoughts. :)

Here's the mobo and device list:

Mainboard: Gigabyte GA-MA785GT-UD3H (has 6 SATA2 ports but no SATA3 ports)
SSD: Intel X-25M (SATA2, about 250MB/s max)
HDDs: 6 Western Digital Green WD20EARS (SATA2, each about 100MB/s max)
DVDRW: Sony, 16x, SATA2, not very fast
Expansion card: ASRock SATA3 Card (has 2 SATA3 ports with 6Mb/s, Marvell 88SE9123 chip)
 
Ok, without checking your mobo manual I can't see any issues, it maybe that having a pci slotcard disables/chokes some of your normal sata ports, but with current info, and assuming your right about the card fully supporting 2.01 speeds
Raid drives all off mobo,
Ssd and optical off the card,
You may have issues setting the ssd as boot from the card though, couldn't say for sure, and it may be worth trawling the storage forum section for raid storage set up advice
Moto
 

wireman_58

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Thanks for checking. I have the manual and it says nothing about a pci slotcard affecting the normal sata ports, so that should not be a problem.

One annoying thing the manual says though is that the PCIe slot shares bandwith with some of the other slots, including the 4x PCIe card that is holding the graphics adapter. (The mobo also has a 16x PCIe slot for a graphics adapter and the 16x slot does not share bandwith with anything, but I cannot use the 16x slot because my CPU cooler is in the way.)
In fact, the manual says: "if a x4 graphics card is inserted then the x1 PCIe slots become unavailable". That sounds like trouble, doesn't it!

I guess I'll try SSD + DVD into the card and all 6 HDDs into the mobo first, see if it works and boots. The card supposedly can boot. If it does not boot or the SSD is slow, I'll move it to the mobo and one of the HDDs to the card.

 

wireman_58

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You are careful in checking the facts. Thanks. I appreciate. :)

I plan to use software raid with Linux so I can go without raidcard.