Sata speeds over PCI-E

iviv · 26 Sep 2018 at 18:47

So, after some troubleshooting I think some of the SATA ports on my motherboard have given up the ghost. While buying a new mobo would be the ideal option, I'm on LGA1150 which is a dead end and buying a whole new motherboard seems pretty overkill (and also expensive for a dead socket), so a PCI-E card seems the best option. I've seen 4 port ones for around £25 which is fair, but I'm worried about speeds.

I'd only be connecting 7200rpm drives up, no SSDs, so that means I rough max of around 200MB/s? The motherboard has pci-e x1 slots gen2, meaning it can do around 500MB/s each way? Meaning that I'd be capable of writing to two drives at full speed while also reading?

That would be fine if it's the case, but just want to check I've got my numbers correct before I go out and buy something that might turn out to be the wrong thing!

blaineoliver · 27 Sep 2018 at 12:17

You are much more likely to be getting closer to 100MB/s than 200MB/s per 7200rpm drive. You should be able to write to 5 at once full speed, which seems fine.

I can't remember how the bios deals with bootable drives from PCI, from experience in enterprise the controller should have its own bios that shows up during the POST and the drives should be fine to boot from.

chaparral · 27 Sep 2018 at 18:42

blaineoliver said:
You are much more likely to be getting closer to 100MB/s than 200MB/s per 7200rpm drive..

My old 3tb Seagate ST3000DM001 HDD transfers at about 160mb/s

blaineoliver · 28 Sep 2018 at 06:38

chaparral said:
My old 3tb Seagate ST3000DM001 HDD transfers at about 160mb/s

Yeah for sequential reads or writes maybe. Anything that's across the platter or contains small files it won't . Realistically you won't have the situation of running out of bandwidth with the pci-e card .