where to plug in a hba pci-e card on my board

[RobTi]

Hi all, i have a gigabyte Z690 GAMING X DDR4 motherboard with only one nvme installed, so no gpu and i would like to plug in a dell hba card h310 and don't know which pci-e slot to use on the board, does it make a difference ?
RThanks

 

[Tetras]

8 lane, PCI-E 2.0, is that right? I googled and that's what the datasheet said.

You have two full-size slots underneath the graphics card, but they're both only 4 lane.

Best performance would be to use the primary (graphics) slot, but it might not matter to you either way.

 

[RobTi]

Hba specs

• Dell H310 HBA IT Mode Firmware SAS/SATA Controller Card
• Two internal mini-SAS ports
• Supports up to eight SAS or SATA drives
• Maximum data transfer rate of 6 Gb/s per device
• PCI-e 2.0 x8 interface
• Based on the LSI SAS2008 chipset
• Pre-flashed with IT mode firmware
• Ideal for software RAID configurations, including ZFS, TrueNAS, UnRAID, and many others
• Supports pass-through mode, ideal for virtualization environments

 

[Tetras]

• Maximum data transfer rate of 6 Gb/s per device
• PCI-e 2.0 x8 interface

8 PCI-E 2.0 lanes has a max throughput of 4 GB a second (from wikipedia article).

8 SATA drives would, in theory, max that out (8 x 0.6 GB), but realistically I doubt you would be using all the drives together and hard drives don't saturate the available bandwidth anyway (though, SSDs can).

So, I would expect one of the 4 lane slots to be sufficient.