September 21, 201114 yr Hi, I'm hoping that someone with a bit more tech knowledge can help me out with a question... I've got a Tyan Thunder K8SR http://www.tyan.com/archive/products/html/thunderk8sr.html motheboard and I'm about to upgrade to new(er) SATA cards because the 3ware 9500s card I have is a bit flakey and doesn't play nicely with spinup/down and SMART commands. I've got 2 x SuperMicro AOC-SAT2-MV8 PCI-X http://www.supermicro.nl/products/accessories/addon/AOC-SAT2-MV8.cfm cards arriving shortly. They are 8-port SATA cards, but I'm only going to be running 8 drives initially. The motherboard has 2 independent PCI-X channels (one slot each). One that can run at 133Mhz and one that can run at 100MHz. So, my question is, should I run 8 drives off one card on the 133Mhz slot, or split across both slots and run 4 drives on each? What are the performance bottlenecks likely to be? Thanks in advance!
September 21, 201114 yr Hi, I'm hoping that someone with a bit more tech knowledge can help me out with a question... I've got a Tyan Thunder K8SR http://www.tyan.com/archive/products/html/thunderk8sr.html motheboard and I'm about to upgrade to new(er) SATA cards because the 3ware 9500s card I have is a bit flakey and doesn't play nicely with spinup/down and SMART commands. I've got 2 x SuperMicro AOC-SAT2-MV8 PCI-X http://www.supermicro.nl/products/accessories/addon/AOC-SAT2-MV8.cfm cards arriving shortly. They are 8-port SATA cards, but I'm only going to be running 8 drives initially. The motherboard has 2 independent PCI-X channels (one slot each). One that can run at 133Mhz and one that can run at 100MHz. So, my question is, should I run 8 drives off one card on the 133Mhz slot, or split across both slots and run 4 drives on each? What are the performance bottlenecks likely to be? Thanks in advance! 4 and 4 would probably be a little faster but I am not sure if you will notice all that much different with either configuration. If it were me I would just attach all drives to one card and be done with it.
September 21, 201114 yr I have two of those cards plugged into a Supermicro X7SBE which also has a 133 and 100 slot. It depends on the speed of your drives, but with 2T green drives I could put 7 drives on the 133 slot card with no speed degradation (tested during parity rebuild). Using the 100 slot I could put 5 drives. All tests were performed with 16 2T drives. I was balancing the drives between the six onboard SATA ports, the two PCIX cards and one SASLP in a PCIe slot. In my testing both SAS2 cards had more bandwidth than the SASLP.
September 21, 201114 yr Author Thanks guys. Out of interest, what kind of speeds were you getting with the 2T green drives (both with hdparm -tT and real-life transfers over the network to unRAID)? Cheers.
September 21, 201114 yr Both those issues are largely independent of the SATA controller card. Write speed to my array I see 25-30MB/s. 113.59 Hitachi 2T (7200 5 platter) 110.50 Seagate 2T (5900 4 platter) 104.78 WD 2T (5400 4 platter)
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