jdubs Posted April 28, 2009 Share Posted April 28, 2009 Guys I really want the Asus P5Q Premium motherboard with 10 onboard SATA ports but I can't get the guys at ASUS to give me a straight answer about whether any of the 10 are on the PCI bus. Has anyone verified the # of SATA ports on a given motherboard that are NOT on the PCI bus? Thanks all! Jim Link to comment
Romir Posted April 28, 2009 Share Posted April 28, 2009 Considering that those ports are intended for raid 0 or 1 use, there's no way they would put them on the pci bus. It would make raid 0 useless. Link to comment
jdubs Posted April 28, 2009 Author Share Posted April 28, 2009 Romir, are you referring to only the 4x hardware RAID ports or all 10 SATA ports? http://usa.asus.com/products.aspx?l1=3&l2=11&l3=709&l4=0&model=2312&modelmenu=1 Thanks! Jim Link to comment
SSD Posted April 28, 2009 Share Posted April 28, 2009 Why would they put the SATA ports on the PCI bus? No one would buy it! Look at the block diagram here. I don't even see a PCI bus with this chipset. I'll bet you can't buy a motherboard with SATA ports on the PCI bus. Link to comment
BryantD Posted April 28, 2009 Share Posted April 28, 2009 Why would they put the SATA ports on the PCI bus? No one would buy it! Look at the block diagram here. I don't even see a PCI bus with this chipset. I'll bet you can't buy a motherboard with SATA ports on the PCI bus. My A8N-SLI Premium has a Silicon Graphics 3114 chipset built-in the MB with 4 SATA I ports which is on the PCI bus.... so at least on ebay you can. Link to comment
RobJ Posted April 28, 2009 Share Posted April 28, 2009 And that's a relatively old motherboard, I don't believe we have seen any recent boards like that. Boards with the additional SiI3112 or SiI3114 chipsets onboard may be the last ones to have SATA ports on the PCI bus. Link to comment
BryantD Posted April 28, 2009 Share Posted April 28, 2009 And that's a relatively old motherboard, I don't believe we have seen any recent boards like that. Boards with the additional SiI3112 or SiI3114 chipsets onboard may be the last ones to have SATA ports on the PCI bus. Oh I agree with you but those boards are still out there to be had. I bought mine on ebay. Link to comment
JRS Posted April 28, 2009 Share Posted April 28, 2009 Any Intel ICH8, ICH9, or ICH10 (expecially "R") chipsets will NOT have those ports on the PCI bus. In fact, I seriously doubt you can find a motherboard with Sata 3Gb/s ports that are on the PCI bus as that would probably disqualify it from being 3Gb/s. My primary desktop has a P5Q Deluxe. I have done a fair amount of testing with single drives and Raid0 pair combinations between the ICH10R, the Drive Xpert ports, cheap PCIe Raid0 cards, a pricier High Point Raid0 PCIe x4 card, and PCI Raid0 cards. In Raid0, the best was ICH10R (~200MB/s), followed by the x4 HighPoint, followed by the cheap PCIe card (~150MB/s), followed by the Drive Xpert ports(~130MB/s), followed by the PCI card (~100 MB/s). Those numbers are sustained data transfer rates off HDTune and transfering a large file yielded similiar rates. Drive access times were all close enough that the drive (vs. the controller) seemed to be the biggest. Drives used were WD640gb blacks. I also did tests with Seagate 500gb 32mb 7200.11 drives and single plater Seagate 250gb 7200.10 drives. From my testing, it was obvious that there is "something" limiting the total bandwidth of drives connected to the Drive Xpert ports when in Raid0. However, I could only see or measure the difference with faster drives, such as 2 platter 640gb drives. With older single plater Seagate 250gb 7200.10 drives, the drives barely did any better on ICH10R vs. Drive Xpert (Raid0). Those drives tended to top out at around 130MB/s on any controller, except PCI where it was less. In Raid0 with quality drives, compared to ICH10R, the Drive Xpert ports, well, kinda stink, but they are fair amount better than PCI. If the Drive Xpert ports are to be used in unRaid in Raid0 mode for the cache drive, I thiink they would work well. I also do NOT see real parity build bandwidth issues using these ports in unRaid for data drives. I would NOT recommend putting a pair of Velociraptors on Drive Xpert ports for desktop Raid0 use as the ports would really hold those drives back. For anyone looking for lots of Raid0 use on a desktop motherboard and really needed a lot of ports, I would NOT recommend an Asus board with Drive Xpert. But my hunch is any non-Intel sata motherboard ports are going to be so-so performers for good drives in Raid0. For single drives, only the burst was held back much at all for Drive Xpert. From my testing, it really appeared that there is a max bandwidth limitation on the Drive Xpert ports and it was really only possible to hit it with quality drives running in Raid0. I do not see these ports as a "negative" for unRaid usage. Another note on Drive Xpert ports - in normal mode (Windows XP and Vista), I could use the second port IF I first connected just one drive to the "Drive 0" port and got it running with the one drive and then shut down, and then add the second drive. I'm not sure this technique would work with unRaid. Link to comment
BryantD Posted April 28, 2009 Share Posted April 28, 2009 "Any Intel ICH8, ICH9, or ICH10 (expecially "R") chipsets will NOT have those ports on the PCI bus. In fact, I seriously doubt you can find a motherboard with Sata 3Gb/s ports that are on the PCI bus as that would probably disqualify it from being 3Gb/s." You can buy PCI based add-on cards that are SATA II with data transfer rate of 3.0Gb/s so the last part of the quote above is inaccurate. I do agree it would be very difficult, if not impossible, to find SATA II ports on a MB that are on the PCI bus. I have one of my Samsung 750G on a SATA I port on the PCI bus and it runs just as fast as when it is on a SATA II port. I also have my cache drive on the SATA PCI bus with little to no difference in performance. I wouldn't go more than 3 drives on it as the performance hit gets much more noticeable. Link to comment
JRS Posted April 28, 2009 Share Posted April 28, 2009 ... You can buy PCI based add-on cards that are SATA II with data transfer rate of 3.0Gb/s so the last part of the quote above is inaccurate. .... From Wiki: SATA 1.5 Gbit/s Frequency 1.5 GHz Real speed 150 MB/s SATA 3 Gbit/s Frequency 3 GHz Real speed 300 MB/s Note the Real speed metric - PCI cannot ever do 300MB/s. PCI has a theoretical limit of (iirc) 133MB/s and a clock speed of 66Mh\Hz. Some basic math here: 113MB/s < 300MB/s. 66MHz < 3 Ghz. So I stand by my statement "3Gb/s ports that are on the PCI bus as that would probably disqualify it from being 3Gb/s". The newegg specs on the Promise x4 PCI card states "...66 MHz PCI bus supports up to 266MB/sec burst data transfer rate" which is another way of saying "this is a standard PCI card", event though it is advertised as "SATA II", the numbers show, it is not. At sustained, in all the benchmarking I've done, I've never seen any PCI device do much over 100MB/s sustained - way off the SATA 3 Gbit/s spec . It may be possible to find a PCI card that claims to be Sata 3 Gbit/s, but as the numbers above show, it would be not be accurate. Link to comment
BryantD Posted April 28, 2009 Share Posted April 28, 2009 ... You can buy PCI based add-on cards that are SATA II with data transfer rate of 3.0Gb/s so the last part of the quote above is inaccurate. .... From Wiki: SATA 1.5 Gbit/s Frequency 1.5 GHz Real speed 150 MB/s SATA 3 Gbit/s Frequency 3 GHz Real speed 300 MB/s Note the Real speed metric - PCI cannot ever do 300MB/s. PCI has a theoretical limit of (iirc) 133MB/s and a clock speed of 66Mh\Hz. Some basic math here: 113MB/s < 300MB/s. 66MHz < 3 Ghz. So I stand by my statement "3Gb/s ports that are on the PCI bus as that would probably disqualify it from being 3Gb/s". The newegg specs on the Promise x4 PCI card states "...66 MHz PCI bus supports up to 266MB/sec burst data transfer rate" which is another way of saying "this is a standard PCI card", event though it is advertised as "SATA II", the numbers show, it is not. At sustained, in all the benchmarking I've done, I've never seen any PCI device do much over 100MB/s sustained - way off the SATA 3 Gbit/s spec . It may be possible to find a PCI card that claims to be Sata 3 Gbit/s, but as the numbers above show, it would be not be accurate. Straight from Newegg's website on a 4 port SATA II PCI based card: "Silicon Image SIL3124 Serial ATA (SATA2) host controller chipset Compatible to PCI specification Support PCI bus-master access Compliant with Serial ATA II specification, the extension of SATA 1.0a Revision 1.1 Compliant with Gen2i, Gen2m SATA II Electrical specification Revision 1.0 Backward compatible to SATA 1.0 specification Support 4 independent SATA ports with data transfer rate at 3.0Gb/s 256 Byte FIFO Per Port for Fast Read/Write Operation Support Native Command Queue (NCQ), Port Multiplier, First Party DMA Support Plug & Play and Hot Plug" Link: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816124008 Look you are right, there is no way that SATA II on a PCI bus ever comes close to 300MB/s. Of course there are no consumer grade HD's that will come close to 300 MB/s on a SATA II port either. My Samsung F1 HD's and Seagate 1TB's are two of the fastest consumer grade drives available and they aren't going to come anywhere near that speed. In the real world there is little to no difference between 1 drive on a PCI bus or a drive on the PCI-e bus. Now when you add more drives to the PCI bus it becomes an issue with 2 being the max w/o the performance being adverselty impacted. Link to comment
jdubs Posted April 29, 2009 Author Share Posted April 29, 2009 I found this in another post about the Asus P5Q Premium board: "6 drives are on the ICH10R. I highly doubt they would design it on the PCI Bus. 4 Drives are on the SIL5723 and and I believe require a Marvel 61xx driver." (thanks WeeboTech) Does this help anyone reading this thread to confirm / not confirm whether some ports may be on the PCI bus? -Jim Link to comment
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