September 14, 200916 yr My unRAID server's motherboard SATA ports are only 150Mb/s SATA I. I have added two 2-port PCIe x1 300Mb/s SATA II adapters, and have one 1.5TB SATA II drive connected to each card. Until recently, my other two drives were older SATA I's, so I left them connected to the motherboard ports. However, I've now replaced one of the older drives with a new Seagate 5900rpm 1.5TB SATA II. It's currently connected to a third motherboard port, and the initial parity check after installation completed at 62.3 MB/sec. My dilemma is, would I be better off connecting the new drive to the second port on one of my PCIe cards or should I leave it on a separate motherboard channel but limited to SATA I speeds? Which would be the greater bottleneck: sharing the PCIe x1 bandwidth between two drives SATA II drives, or limiting one of them to SATA I on a motherboard port?
September 15, 200916 yr I have a Seagate 5900 RPM 1.5TB drive. It is reading at 91MB/s. Therefore you can keep this on the motherboard port with minimal issue. The 7200 RPM 1.5TB's read around 120MB/s. The only drive I would consider keeping separate is the Parity drive, even then A 1X port can reach speeds of 250Mb/s (500MB/s in both directions simultaneously) so that could share the 1X controller too.
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