Hi,
I am getting ready to add a few drives and bought LSI SAS 9211-8i card (and got it working after figuring out the 'tape mod').
my build is quite old (but working ok) with a Gigabyte GA-Z68A-DH3-B3 motherboard. Before adding any thing I started to wonder if I had things plugged into optimal slots.
The MB has 2 6GB SATA ports, and 4 3GB SATA ports. I currently have all 6 ports used (1 ssd cache drive and 5 HDD including parity).
In regards to PCIe slots, the board is version 2. I have a nvidia T400 in the x16 top slot.
I put the LSI card into the X16 "x4" slot.
Then I realized I was not sure if I was bottlenecking something. It looks like a PCIe X4 version 2 has a 2GB/s speed which would be slower than any of the onboard SATA slots.
Assume I should have the SSD in the onboard 6GB port? And if I add a 2nd SSD for dual cache I should use the other 6GB onboard.
For HDDs - will I see a performance difference using onboard 3GB/s port versus the LSI card sharing a 2GB/S PCIe 4x slot?
thanks for any comments / suggestions on how to configure this.