After about 1 year of procrastinating, I am ready to start my build.  I need to buy a SATA card.  I have an Intel DG33FB motherboard that has 4 SATA ports, 3 PCI, 3 PCIe X1 and 1 PCIe x16 slots.  I am using onboard video so I don't need the PCIe X16 for a video card and am wondering if I could use it for a PCIe X4 SATA card like the SuperMicro AOC-SASLP-MV8.  If you don't think that this will work, is there a decent PCIe x1 card I can get or would I be better off getting a new motherboard with PCIe X4 slots?

thanks,

Murray

After about 1 year of procrastinating, I am ready to start my build.  I need to buy a SATA card.  I have an Intel DG33FB motherboard that has 4 SATA ports, 3 PCI, 3 PCIe X1 and 1 PCIe x16 slots.  I am using onboard video so I don't need the PCIe X16 for a video card and am wondering if I could use it for a PCIe X4 SATA card like the SuperMicro AOC-SASLP-MV8.  If you don't think that this will work, is there a decent PCIe x1 card I can get or would I be better off getting a new motherboard with PCIe X4 slots?

thanks,

Murray

 

The SASLP card should work in the x16 slot.  For cheap x1 cards check out Monoprice

After about 1 year of procrastinating, I am ready to start my build.  I need to buy a SATA card.  I have an Intel DG33FB motherboard that has 4 SATA ports, 3 PCI, 3 PCIe X1 and 1 PCIe x16 slots.  I am using onboard video so I don't need the PCIe X16 for a video card and am wondering if I could use it for a PCIe X4 SATA card like the SuperMicro AOC-SASLP-MV8.  If you don't think that this will work, is there a decent PCIe x1 card I can get or would I be better off getting a new motherboard with PCIe X4 slots?

thanks,

Murray

 

The SASLP card should work in the x16 slot.  For cheap x1 cards check out Monoprice

Thanks.  Would I see any noticeable speed difference between the monoprice x1 cards vs. the SASLP card?  If not, I think I will go with 3 cards from monoprice.  The 4 MB + 6 x1 SATA ports will be enough for me for now.

Thanks.  Would I see any noticeable speed difference between the monoprice x1 cards vs. the SASLP card?  If not, I think I will go with 3 cards from monoprice.  The 4 MB + 6 x1 SATA ports will be enough for me for now.

I do not believe so.

 

The advantage of the SASLP is less and better cable management.

Thanks.  Would I see any noticeable speed difference between the monoprice x1 cards vs. the SASLP card?  If not, I think I will go with 3 cards from monoprice.  The 4 MB + 6 x1 SATA ports will be enough for me for now.

I do not believe so.

 

The advantage of the SASLP is less and better cable management.

I'll never be able to compete with some of the builds I have seen here as far as cable management, so I will go with the x1 cards for now then in the future add the SASLP card when I need to go beyond 10 drives.  One last question...does it matter what drives I put on the 10 available SATA ports?  Should the cache be on one of the MB ports?  If I only have 7 drives now, should I put 4 on the MB ports, and 1 on each x1 card or put 2 on one card, 1 on another and leave the other one blank for now?  I have a mixture of drive types (they are all 2TB) and I think I have 2 pairs that are the same type.  Should I try to put the same drive type on the same card or MB ports or space them out so there are different drives on each card/MB port or does it not matter?

 

Sorry that one more question ended up being more than 1 question!

 

thanks!

fill your motherboard ports first (inc parity and cache), and then after that, I dont think it makes too much of a difference!

 

the 1x cards should be able to fully drive the 2 disks, so I personally dont think its necessary to spread them out 1 per card initially