Planning a motherboard swap..more growing pains

[daniel.boone]

I'm running low on space and I'm toying with a couple of ideas. Any advice is appreciated

 

My current rig has a ASUS MB with 6 sata ports. Along the way I added a monoprice SIL pcie card for 8 sata ports total. All are used up with 1TB drives. My case has the potential for housing 12 drives in 4x3 cages. The cages could be swapped out for 5x3s in the future. I just picked up a new 2TB drive which I will use for a parity drive swap. I have maybe 50GB free spead out over my drives.

 

I'm thinking of getting a new Gigabyte motherboard with 8 onboard ports plus I'd use my 1430sa and the SIL card for a total of 14 ports. My ASUS didn't like the 1430sa.

 

Does it make sense to switch out the MB now. I'm was adding a TB drive about every 3 or 4 months. While I don't have free pcie slots on my ASUS I could add a cheap pci SIL card and plug the old parity drive there after the swap. Performance would take a hit but it would be limited to the one drive.

 

If I do swap the MB should I leave some of the onboard ports available for adding future 2TB drives? Does it really matter? I've read best speed is achieved by using onboard sata ports. Any other gotchas regarding a motherboard swap? I am aware of disabling the HPA on the GB motherboards.

 

TIA,

db

 

 

[Joe L.]

If you only have one disk drive on the PCI bus I'm not so sure you'll see much performance loss.  The PCI bus can handle 133MB/s... most disk drives are slower than that with actual performance in unRAID being somewhere between 75 and 100 MB/s even if not on a congested PCI bus.

 

Joe L.

 

[daniel.boone]

If you only have one disk drive on the PCI bus I'm not so sure you'll see much performance loss.  The PCI bus can handle 133MB/s... most disk drives are slower than that with actual performance in unRAID being somewhere between 75 and 100 MB/s even if not on a congested PCI bus.

 

Joe L.

 

 

Nice that buys me a little time.

 

cheers db

[queeg]

If you only have one disk drive on the PCI bus I'm not so sure you'll see much performance loss.  The PCI bus can handle 133MB/s... most disk drives are slower than that with actual performance in unRAID being somewhere between 75 and 100 MB/s even if not on a congested PCI bus.

 

Joe L.

 

 

Do that mean 75 and 100 MB/s per hard drive?  Can a box with 4 drives on the motherboard with all drives busy get that on each drive at the same time?

[Joe L.]

If you only have one disk drive on the PCI bus I'm not so sure you'll see much performance loss.  The PCI bus can handle 133MB/s... most disk drives are slower than that with actual performance in unRAID being somewhere between 75 and 100 MB/s even if not on a congested PCI bus.

 

Joe L.

 

 

Do that mean 75 and 100 MB/s per hard drive?  Can a box with 4 drives on the motherboard with all drives busy get that on each drive at the same time?

No, the 133MB/s is for the whole PCI bus.  With 4 drives on it you'll be lucky to get 20 MB/s per drive.

[queeg]

How does PCIe sata adapter in a PCIe 1x slot do with 2 to 4 drives?

[Joe L.]

How does PCIe sata adapter in a PCIe 1x slot do with 2 to 4 drives?

Bandwidth of a PCI-x1 slot is given as 250 MB/s according to this link

http://www.interfacebus.com/Design_Connector_PCI_Express.html

 

It should have no problem keeping up with 2 drives and may be a bottleneck with 4 (depending on how fast the drives actually are)  There's no way you are going to read 4 drives at 100 MB/s on a bus that maxes out at 250MB/s.

 

Joe L.

[batfink]

How does PCIe sata adapter in a PCIe 1x slot do with 2 to 4 drives?

 

I have 8 drives running on 4 pcie x1 slots (2 per slot) and parity speed is perfectly fine (for me). takes about 7 hours to run through with 12 drives and ~10 tb

[Rajahal]

You might consider just upgrading some of your 1 TB drives to 2 TB drives instead of swapping the mobo.  Buying a completely new mobo just to gain 2 extra onboard SATA slots seems a bit expensive to me.  However, if the new mobo also allows you to use an extra expansion card that you have laying around, I guess that makes sense.

[daniel.boone]

You might consider just upgrading some of your 1 TB drives to 2 TB drives instead of swapping the mobo.  Buying a completely new mobo just to gain 2 extra onboard SATA slots seems a bit expensive to me.  However, if the new mobo also allows you to use an extra expansion card that you have laying around, I guess that makes sense.

 

Just upgrading my drives was the orginal plan but if you really think about it the MB upgrade makes total sense.

 

Upgrading 1TB drives to 2TB only give me an additional TB of space. Adding ports now will give me a chance to add the full 2TB per drive after the parity swap. Eventually I'll get short on space to add hardware. When that happens I will probably have to swap out the 1TB for larger drives. Adding a 2TB drive should hold me out for 6 to 8 months. Adding a single TB would only be good for half that.

 

I picked up the Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3P. I'll just reuse my CPU and ram. I have a old pci video card I can reuse as well. Another board member has posted a success with the adaptec card. The MB also has additional pcie slots I can leverage later on. I will probably swap out the parity drive this weekend. If all goes well during the next week or two I would swap out the MB after.