A8N-SLI Deluxe PCIex16 question (SATA controller card)

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Hi all

 

I bought 4 cheap (PCIex1) dual port SATA cards for this MB to replace the 2 pci (slow-as-hell) SATA cards I was using. The MB is SLi so has 1 x PCIe16 + 1 x PCIe1 (which I think probably runs at x8 in SLi mode), plus another 2 x PCIex1 slots. I didn't know that the 2 port cards would work but at only £15/card, what the hell, it was worth a try....

 

Anyway........ all 4 cards work, at the same time, in each of the 4 various PCIe slots. I'm not using the 4 onboard Silicon Image SATA ports (they're on the PCI bus), but I am using the 4 x 3Gb/sec slots. In total therefore I have 12 drives and have seen a marked decrease in the time it takes to run parity checks. In summary, I'm a happy bunny.

 

My question is: does anyone know if a 4 port PCIex4 (or better!) card will work (at x4 speed) in the x16 slot. My guess would be that it would, but since the cost of these cards is proportionately more than the cheap-o cards I'm using I though I would ask before buying one. I'm in no immediate rush to add more drives (have 3 x 500Gb drives to replace with 2Tb before I consider that), but just curious.

 

Thanks!

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As it turns out, I'm temporarily using an A8N-SLI in my box until a newer board arrives, and I have two of the Supermicro AOC-SASLP-MV8 8-Port SAS/SATA cards on their way. I'll try it out and see what I can figure out for you. Or maybe it'll work well enough and I will use the new board elsewhere.

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As it turns out, I'm temporarily using an A8N-SLI in my box until a newer board arrives, and I have two of the Supermicro AOC-SASLP-MV8 8-Port SAS/SATA cards on their way. I'll try it out and see what I can figure out for you. Or maybe it'll work well enough and I will use the new board elsewhere.

 

Thanks!

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Ok, the cards arrived, and here's my preliminary results. Please note, I have the "original" A8N-SLI, which has 2 PCI-E x1 slots and 2 x16 slots. It also has a little dimm-like card on the board that you are supposed to flip over to run two video cards. There is a newer version of this motherboard which has 1 x1, 1 x4, and 2 x16 slots, and no dimm-like device.

 

With the card in the "single video card" position, both cards do initialize, but the one in the secondary x16 slot comes up in x1 mode, instead of x4 mode. The card in the primary slot does boot up in x4 mode.

 

With the card in the "dual video cards" position, both cards come up in x4 mode.

 

Drives are recognized and are listed in the unRAID Devices screen. I ran a preclear on two older disks, a 250GB WD2500YD-01NVB1 enterprise disk and a 500GB WD5000AAJS-22YFA0 consumer disk. Throughput for the 250GB disk was ~55MB/s and the 500GB disk was ~78MB/s. Controllers haven't thrown any errors, looks like the board supports two x4 in the x16 slots just fine.

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Are the cards still running without any errors? It would be good to know it's 'safe' to use when the time comes!

 

Cheers 

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I've been running this board/card combo and I'm not having any trouble at all. I've only got 9 drives connected, but separated out onto the various ports on the various controllers.

 

I last rebooted on May 25, in order to add some more disks to the array, but that's the only reason I've had to down the system.

 

So yes, I'd say it's running without errors, aside from the standard HDIO_GET_ENTITY errors that happen due to the immature driver for this card. That happens on any motherboard though, and doesn't seem to cause anyone problems.

 

 

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Thanks very much