My motherboard has two pci slots, one pcie x1 and one pcie x16.

 

I currently have nothing in the 2 pci slots; I have an Intel 1 Gb/s NIC in the pcie x1 slot--motherboard NIC only has 100mbps NIC.  And I plan on putting a BR10i  in the pcie x16 slot.

 

Should I replace the Intel pcie NIC with a PCI version of it?  I understand that PCI bandwidth is 133MB/s and PCIE x1 is 500MB/s.    133MB/s would handle the bandwidth Gb/s ethernet traffic.  I could then perhaps get a 4 channel pci-e sata controller since 500MB/s divided by 4 is 125MB/s each (which sounds good for each drive to me since that's about what I get with my onboard controllers).

 

 

Some improvement, but not nearly (or quite) as rosy as you're hoping.

 

It all depends on whether your Mobo's x1 slot is PCI-E Gen 1 or 2.

 

As an example, if it's Gen1 you've got a practical (!!!) limit of ~180 MB/s for each direction. For Gen2, ~350 MB/s.

 

If it's Gen1, only use a 2-port (and buy a Gen2 one) and put the cache drive on one port, and parity somewhere else.

 

If it's Gen2, either use a 2-port Gen2  (without restriction), or a 4-port Gen2 with the above restriction. Note that 4-port x1 cards are uncommon and pricey.

 

It also depends on if your Controller card supports PCIe 2.0.

 

Many of them simply don't.

 

BUT, i had the same idea, adding drives to the PCIe 1x port. From my expierience gigabit ethernet is ok on a PCI slot.

 

Also, i cannot believe that your onboard Network is only 100mbit. I even have a old P4(well, had), that had gigabit onboard and my old Powermac G4 with only 533Mhz has Gigabit ethernet aswell..

I got this motherboard free from my boyfriend for the NAS, lol.  It is in fact only 10/100--it's about 4 or 5 years old or so.  My motherboard on my hackintosh has 1Gb/s ethernet.

 

I asked my BF and he said yeah the motherboard has only pci-e version 1.1.

 

Is the IBM BR10i compatible with PCI 1.1 or does it need PCI 2.0?  Hopefully this ASUS motherboard will work with the br10i.. i know some motherboards x16 slot will work with video cards only.  The motherboard is ASUS P5GC-MX/1333.

You mean pci express? Because that's a PCIe card.

You mean pci express? Because that's a PCIe card.

 

Yes I meant to type PCIe thanks.