Hi All,

 

Hoping for some guidance. I just built up my first unRAID NAS. I have used mostly recycled parts - Core2Duo, Asus COmmando motherboard. It has 6 x SATA 3Gbps ports, so Im looking at my options for a SATA controller card. The thing is, this motherboard has 2 x PCI-Ex16 slots, but they are standard PCI slot size. Im guessing this is like PCI-E 1.0 or something, but cant find what cards would suit?

 

I figure the slots being x16 is a positive thing but not if I cant find anything to fit them. All the highpoint cards im looking at seem like the smaller PCI size.

 

Any ideas what my best option is?

 

Thanks

Do you mean this mobo?  It appears to have four standard PCI slots, and two perfectly standard PCIe x16 slots (one of which only operates at x4 mode).

 

Any standard PCIe controller should fit in those two slots.

 

Edit to add:

 

Perhaps you're being confused because you are looking at x4 or x1 controller cards, which don't populate all the pins on the motherboard sockets.  This is no problem - the PCIe bus is designed so that cards of different lane numbers can be used in the larger sockets - this will leave some unconnected pins on the mobo socket.

 

Just one warning ... some motherboards/chipsets will only support a graphics card (not a disk controller) in the PCIe x16 slot, and manufacturers don't always make this clear.

Thanks peter B. I've been overwhelmed for the last two weeks with constant emhttp/Webgui failures and so suddenly the future plans for more drives took a backseat. Close to giving up on this solution but its been up and stable for 5 days now so I think I have isolated the issue to Couch Potato plugin.

 

Yes  I was confused by the physical size of the slot versus the adapters. From what you say it will be fine to slot the smaller PCI-e card into the full length slots.

 

Good news!