PCI SATA card - quick enough ?

[Snow-Munki]

Hi,

When I finally build my file server on the Atom mini ITX board, it only has 2 SATA onboard ports. So plan to get a PCI adapter card with 2 SATA and 2 eSATA.

however was thihking surely if I had 4 HDD's plugged to it, it would bottleneck the PCI bus ??

Would I be better of getting the more expensive ION Atom boards, as they have more SATA ports and PCI-e ?

Thanks,

 

[rpstewart]

If you try and read or write from all the drives at once then yeah, it'll be bottlenecked by the bus however if this is going to be a file server then the PCI bus isn't going to be the overall bottleneck. Even with gigabit ethernet you've got a theoretical maximum of 125MB/s compared to PCI's 133MB/s. Once you take into account the various overheads and other real world stuff the capacity of the ethernet is likely to be 80MB/s or so at best.

 

[Snow-Munki]

ah, thnaks for that. Makes perfect sense