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I recently picked up a 2013 HP Z420 workstation with no GPU and no storage. I found an EVGA 1060 6Gb for $50 locally and had some storage lying around so it wasn't very difficult to get it up and running. The motherboard has 10 SATA ports but only two of them are at SATA III spec, the other eight are SATA II. I'd like to get a few more SATA ports up to SATA III speeds, but what's the easiest way to do that? I was looking at a handful of rather questionable PCIe 3.0x1 port multiplier cards, but then I found out about the LSI 9217-4i4e 6Gbps SAS/SATA controller and RAID card as mentioned here being an optional peripheral in the original documentation. And this is what brings me to posting this thread, because I have no idea how to figure out what the answer to my question is otherwise. Q: Would installing the LSI 9217-4i4e card bring all eight of the SATA II lanes already available on the motherboard up to SATA III speeds? Or would I be better off with some kind of janky 3.0x1 port multiplier like this? The SAS/SATA controller card and the port multiplier cards can be had for <$50 a piece, but obviously if the SAS/SATA card does what I'm thinking it does as mentioned above then it's the obvious choice. I just need someone to say "yes that's how it works" or "no that's not how it works, that's not how any of this works." Thanks! Edit: Additionally, if a single lane PCIe 3.0 slot can theoretically only have a max throughput speed of ~985Mb/s, and SATA III can only theoretically max out at 600Mb/s, then what the hell good is a 10-port multiplier that utilizes a single lane 3.0 slot? Either each lane is getting 90Mb/s max throughput, or you've got ten SATA ports all fighting for priority and bottlenecking each other as soon as two or more become engaged, no? Am I crazy to question the functionality of a 10-port SATA III multiplier on a single PCIe 3.0 slot, or is a 3.0x1 slot actually only good for like two or three SATA III ports max? Apologies if this is all novice stuff, I haven't had a Windows PC since 2007 and things have changed massively since then. XYZAB fucked around with this message at 03:20 on Mar 12, 2023 |
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Mar 12, 2023 03:07
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XYZAB posted:Q: Would installing the LSI 9217-4i4e card bring all eight of the SATA II lanes already available on the motherboard up to SATA III speeds? No, it wouldn't change the ports already on the motherboard. XYZAB posted:Edit: Additionally, if a single lane PCIe 3.0 slot can theoretically only have a max throughput speed of ~985Mb/s, and SATA III can only theoretically max out at 600Mb/s, then what the hell good is a 10-port multiplier that utilizes a single lane 3.0 slot? Either each lane is getting 90Mb/s max throughput, or you've got ten SATA ports all fighting for priority and bottlenecking each other as soon as two or more become engaged, no? Am I crazy to question the functionality of a 10-port SATA III multiplier on a single PCIe 3.0 slot, or is a 3.0x1 slot actually only good for like two or three SATA III ports max? Yeah, that looks like a bottleneck if you're doing large transfers between all the drives. The assumption is that that wouldn't be happening too often. In recent years most desktop users have moved away from SATA ports and have begun to use M.2 NVMe SSDs as they're much faster.
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Mar 12, 2023 23:34
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The first question I would have is, what exactly do you plan on doing that you think would actually meaningfully benefit from accomplishing your goal? Are you going to get a bunch of SSDs and just copy huge files between them constantly? It seems likely that any sane real-world usage scenario would see little to no benefit from the changes you want to make.
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Mar 13, 2023 20:25
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Zogo posted:No, it wouldn't change the ports already on the motherboard. Thanks for the reply. I have a few NVMe drives in other computers and might opt for an adaptor in the spare 3.0x16 slot in future, but it’s a bit overkill for my budget and needs right now, and since that SATA/RAID controller won’t do the trick I’ll just get a cheap two port 6gbps pci x1 card. Additionally, which sort of dampens my willingness to go that far, is that there’s apparently no way to boot from an NVME drive on this system unless you get a very specific out-of-production model from like 7 years ago. This thing is just old enough that HP never got around to pushing a BIOS update for universal NVME boot support before the whole workstation lineup was considered EOL, at least as far as I’ve been able to determine. K8.0 posted:The first question I would have is, what exactly do you plan on doing that you think would actually meaningfully benefit from accomplishing your goal? Are you going to get a bunch of SSDs and just copy huge files between them constantly? It seems likely that any sane real-world usage scenario would see little to no benefit from the changes you want to make. I have three SSDs in the system; one for Windows boot, one for steam library, plus one for Linux currently on 3gbps, and a 5.25” bay to bare drive dock adaptor. I’m mostly just intending to do some light gaming while reacclimatizing myself to Windows in general (and gently caress around in Linux on the side) after 15 years of being Mac-only. I was mostly wanting to figure out the easiest way to get the Linux SSD and dock adaptor up to max speed the cheapest and easiest way possible, in the event that it becomes marginally irritating to only ever see 300MB/s max transfer speeds using either of those two devices. Looks like a small $15 two port pci card is the way to go. XYZAB fucked around with this message at 06:13 on Mar 14, 2023 |
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Mar 14, 2023 05:53
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