Hi All, I'm using some older hardware in my unraid box and trying to figure out the best way to physically connect drives.

 

Motherboard uses SATA1. An expansion card uses SATA2.

 

Currently: 

Moherboard has 4TB Parity, two 3TB and 1 2TB data drives connected

Expansion card has both 256GB SSD cache drives and final 2TB data drive.

 

System is an 8 core Xeon with 24GB Ram. Upgrading hardware is not an option except possibly the expansion card if it's worth it in the slower/older slots.

 

Cache drives are allowed for all shares except my "media" share - movies/tv/music with my mover set to 12 hour intervals (it's not a heavy use server)

 

Cache drives also house 1 Windows 10 VM and docker for Plex and Handbrake.

 

I'm only asking because sometimes when copying large files or multiple files to the box it copies at ~300 MB/s for the first Gig or so, then drops to zero for a while, then resumes at 50-80MB/s for a while, then drops to 5MB/s for a while, etc.  Copies never fail and files are never corrupt.

 

What's the "right" way?

 

Cheers.

 

You give no information about the expansion card, other than it has at least three SATA-2 ports.