camprr

But it's not like you are sitting next to it, waiting. Are you? I am talking about performance bottlenecks that cause a loss in 'exterior' performance. I mean, after all, you have to have something that processes data at that speed. So if we manage to reach 10Gbit, basically all is good. Or not? And 10Gbit can go through a PCIe x2 slot. My internet connection is 1Gbit, I do a but of unparring (but that's all read from memory, as they are recent writes), and then the media is watched at a 'mellow' pace (10-50Mbit). My question is more this: "for a hobby environment, a PCIe x4 to 24xSATA card is plenty good". Yes, I think is the answer to that. For enterprise server grade stuff not, but would you be running Unraid for that? More likely ceph or something that provides multi-node redundancy and increased performance.

For all those concerned about bandwidth (and saying solution is bad, because it's limited), also think about the PCIe bus connection. 1x PCIe lane is around 1Gbyte/sec (more like 750Mbytes/sec in practice). So this card is 4 lanes, maximum ~3000Mbytes/sec. Which is ~125Mbytes/sec/drive. That's just about golden for 5400rpm disks. If you have a x8 Adaptec/LSI card, it's not going to be pushing much faster when using all drives at the same time. I think that last thing is key. When are you likely to use 24 drives _at the same time_? Quite unlikely unless you have a 24-drive Raid-5/6 set (and that is nuts from a reliability point of view.) @bing281, did you come to a conclusion of your tests? (I ask because I have one laying on my desk, about to be used for 8Tbyte QVO SATA SSDs as a long-term storage for 8x Intel P4150 drives which are going to be connected through this extra cool/special card: https://www.amazon.nl/-/en/PCIe-ports-Switch-chipset-Profile/dp/B097HRQJZ8 (PCIe 3.0 card 16x for 8 SSD U.2 NVMe (U2 NGFF) or 8 ports PCIe x4 Multi Host Switch Card chipset PLX PEX 8749 High and Low Profile.). The idea is to use the NVMe disks as a caching layer in front of the SATA disks. Basically the PCIe switch card allows me to use 8 drives, on a 16x PCIe bus. Limited to ~1500Mbytes/drive, and if all used at the same time, around 12Gbytes/sec. So the SATA backup is a factor ~4x slower than the cache. The idea is to have the cards in the server and add disks as my requirements grow.