Okay, as a baseline I have 6 Seagate 1tb drives, initially all 6 on the ICH8R motherboard controller.... Parity check at the 1% point was about 81 MB/sec. I moved the last two drives, one on each new card... wow... 87 MB/sec... reflects the reduced load on the ICH8R, and each of the two moved drives had it's own PCIE 1X lane... put both drives on one new controller... ooops down to 66 MB/sec... ouch... two drives on one lane ain't so good! Installed the Adaptec in the empty PCIE 16X video card slot (running PCI video).... put both drives on it... 92 MB/sec... I like it...
so......... I'm gonna leave it just like this.... I can put 6 drives on the ICH8R, 4 on the Adaptec, and one on each Rosewill for 12 drives, which goes with my 4 3in2 Kingwins
the other on-board connections will be for the Cache drive and my Slackware boot drive! ciao....
Great info Jim Q: For a 16 drive system on an AB9 Pro is this the best setup?: use all 9 internal sata, the 1 external (loop back into case), 4 on an Adaptec in the 16x slot, then 1/ea on Rosewill in the 1x slots? Or 2/Rosewill or some other config with 2 or 3 on a PM? Does anyone make a 8 port card that works with unRaid instead of the 4 port Adaptec?
Thanks