On Sun, Oct 24, 2021, at 5:40 PM, Charles Curley wrote: > My knowledge of hardware has gotten rather rusty of late, so I would > like to pick your brains. > > I have a system with an Asus H97M-E motherboard. According to the > manual, it has: > > Intel ® H97 Express Chipset with RAID 0, 1, 5, 10 and Intel ® > Rapid Storage Technology 13 support > - 4 x SATA 6.0 Gb/s ports (gray) > - 1 x M.2 Socket 3 > > I currently have an SSD drive, /dev/sda, for OS, etc., two Western > Digital Red 4 TB WDC WD40EFRX hard drives providing a RAID1 array, and > a HL-DT-ST CD/DVD/Blu-Ray drive. Those four SATA device exhaust my SATA > connectors. If I understand the manual and what I see on the > motherboard correctly, that exhausts my SATA ports. > > My plan is to buy another WD40EFRX, and upgrade the RAID array to > RAID10. That suggests I need an expansion card to go into one of the > PCIe slots, of which I have: > > Expansion slots > 1 x PCI Express 3.0/2.0 x16 slot (at x16 mode) > 3 x PCI Express 2.0 x1 slots > > I am using Linux RAID, not the hardware RAID. > > and the aforementioned M.2 Socket 3, whatever that is. > > My thought is to add the new drive using the SATA connector where the > DVD drive is now, and buy an adapter for the DVD drive. Is that a > reasonable layout, or should I put the new drive onto an adapter? > > Any recommendations for the adapter card?
There are a couple approaches you could take with this. The cheapest would be to just get a 2port SATA PCIe adapter to install into one of the 1x PCIe slots. Those slots are only PCIe 2.0 speeds and so the max throughput on a single slot is only 500MB/sec. That is kind of disappointing but then just about every cheap PCIe 1x SATA adapter I've looked at is also only PCIe 2.0. So even if you had a PCIe 3.0 slot, you'd likely still be limited on speed. With doing a single dual port SATA adapter, you'd have a choice of what's connected to the adapter. You could do the 2 new HDDs on it. The drives would be sharing the 500MB/sec speed of the PCIe 1x slot. This likely isn't an issue with hard drives since hard drives are only going to exceed 250MB/sec of bandwidth under specific circumstances if at all. Likely only on large sequential IO operations though that does include raid maintenance like a check or resync. The other option would be to rearrange your drives so the OS and the optical drive are on the PCIe card and the hard drives use all of the build in ports. Assuming you have a SATA 3 (6gbps) SSD, then you would be potentially creating a bottleneck for it during sequential IO operations. That is a less likely scenario for the OS disk and the optical drive is never gonna get that high. Either approach will be just fine with just a dual port SATA adapter. As far as potential cards, you're probably okay with just about anything readily on the market. Most cheap cards use controllers from Marvell, JMicron, or ASMedia. iirc, all of those just end up using the generic AHCI driver. I've bought a few different ones over the last several years and I think the only issue I had was that one came with a capacitor that was rattling around in the box. I didn't try that one and was one a deadline so I just ordered another. I've got SYBA and IOCrest in my Newegg history but don't remember which had the cap issue. If you are really concerned about the PCIe 2.0 1x speeds, then you could do multiple of them and use multiple PCIe slots. The other option would be to move the OS drive to the M.2 like Todd was saying. You could get an M.2 SSD for it though the manual doesn't say if that socket is wired for PCIe or SATA or both. I wouldn't be surprised if its a SATA only socket given the generation and will not be any faster than a regular 2.5" SSD. If it is just SATA, you could get an adapter from M.2 to a SATA 7pin and hook your existing SSD up to it. Something like https://www.amazon.com/M-2-Dual-Notch-SATA-Adapter/dp/B00HZS313S could work. That leaves the optical drive though and if you want to keep it then you would need a regular PCIe adapter or hook it up over USB. Hopefully that is some helpful information. mike /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
