I have a asus p5b-vmd0 motherboard and I am out of sata ports. I am using 2 pci monoprice 4 port sata cards

http://www.monoprice.com/products/product.asp?c_id=104&cp_id=10407&cs_id=1040702&p_id=2667&seq=1&format=2

. Now the question is can I use both the  PCI-E x16  and the PCI-E x4 slots

and install 2 of these http://www.monoprice.com/products/product.asp?c_id=104&cp_id=10407&cs_id=1040702&p_id=2530&seq=1&format=2

This would allow an additional 4 ports?

 

Would this be faster than using the pci bus ??

 

 

 

Or would 2 of these be a better choice

 

http://cgi.ebay.ca/2-eSATA-2-SATA-II-2-0-PCI-E-PCIE-RAID-Express-Card-K35_W0QQitemZ260369882471QQcmdZViewItemQQptZAU_Components?hash=item260369882471&_trksid=p3286.c0.m14&_trkparms=66%3A2%7C65%3A15%7C39%3A1%7C240%3A1318

If you have a P5B VM DO, then you have 7 on board SATA ports and 1 eSATA port.  With an e-Sata to Sata cable you can have 8 internal sata ports.

 

This MB has 2 PCI-e slots - 1 4x and 1 16x.  You CAN use both of these slots and still have the onboard video function.

 

I would recommend 2 Adaptec 1430SA cards.  Each has 4 full speed SATA ports.  With the motherboard ( + 2 of the these (2x4= you would have 16 full speed sata ports.

 

PCI-based boards are okay, but will get slow on parity checks if you go over 2 or 3 PCI drives.

 

Yeah the cards are expensive in Canada that is why I was looking at the throw away monoprice cards with the sil3132 chipset. If they will be fine for streaming my movies I will buy them. The pci versions work fine. But maybe that is why my parity is so slow. I have it hooked up to the last port of my second  4 port pci card. Maybe I should by the pci-e versions and hook up the parity drive to that.

The trade offs between PCI vs PCI-e are well documented in the forums.  Check out the "Best of the Forums" link in my sig.  There is a PCI vs PCI-e link that I wrote a while back that explains it pretty well and gives some benchmarks.

 

Bottom line, though - 1-2 drives on the PCI bus is fine.  3-5 will slow down parity checks but still pretty reasonable.  >5 will really bog down parity checks.  But if you can live with the lengthy parity checks (we're only talking about a day a month that you are running them), PCI is just as fast as PCI-e for situations where the bus is not saturated.  And saturating the bus is pretty darn hard to do with normal media use.

 

Have you used the e-SATA port on the back of the motherboard?  A $6 cable and you get another high speed port.  I'd definitely do that first!