20 replies to this topic

[razerfanboi]

About to pick up a couple samsung 830 128GB drives since the price is in the toilet with the release of the new 840s. However, I'm out of SATA ports on my P45. I have 6 ports on the Intel controller (ICH10R) and 2 on the Gigabyte controller. The Gigabyte controller, unfortunately is dead and is unusable. I wanted to get something like this:

http://www.newegg.co...N82E16817999022

because I have 2 other 2.5" drives just sitting in my case (screwed down but not very well). But as I said, between my 2x2.5" drives, 3x3.5" drives and my DVD drive my Intel controller is full.

So, here is the plan. My mother-in-law is paying for all this and my limit is $250-$300.

2x Samsung 830 128GB = $180
Bay adapter = $60

Total = $230

Which leaves $20-$70 for a simple SATA card that I can use to attach all my storage drives to (1x3.5" and the 2x2.5"). Or I can skip the fancy hotswap shenanigans and get something like this:

http://www.newegg.co...N82E16817997041

or:

http://www.newegg.co...N82E16817995074

and increase my SATA card price up to $60-$120.



Can anyone suggest a decent (not going to die on me in the next 2 years) SATA card so I can have all my drives hooked up, and I don't have to start getting external cases for them? I originally wanted a port multiplier but then I discovered Intel doesn't support them (doh!).
Also, can anyone explain how PCI-E lanes work? From what I understand, the P45 only has 16 lanes. Does that mean if I get a PCI-E SATA card, it will pull lanes away from my GTX-460 and reduce its performance? If that is true, then I will probaly do the external-drive thing and call it a day

[Waco]

IMHO you'd be far better off moving those SSDs to the Intel controller and putting your regular HDDs and optical drive on a cheap PCIe SATA card. If you try to use your SSDs on a host-based controller card (which all cheap cards are) it's going to be exceedingly slow compared to running on a good controller or SATA/RAID card.

[razerfanboi]

IMHO you'd be far better off moving those SSDs to the Intel controller and putting your regular HDDs and optical drive on a cheap PCIe SATA card. If you try to use your SSDs on a host-based controller card (which all cheap cards are) it's going to be exceedingly slow compared to running on a good controller or SATA/RAID card.

That's what I was planning to do. Can you suggest a cheap-ish SATA card?
And will a PCIe card take away performance from my GPU? That's something I'm still not certain of.

[SpikeSoprano]

IMHO you'd be far better off moving those SSDs to the Intel controller and putting your regular HDDs and optical drive on a cheap PCIe SATA card. If you try to use your SSDs on a host-based controller card (which all cheap cards are) it's going to be exceedingly slow compared to running on a good controller or SATA/RAID card.

+1 you definitely want to run the ssd's off the intel controller.

[razerfanboi]

+1 you definitely want to run the ssd's off the intel controller.

Yeah, I knew that was how i needed to do it because I've seen some people say that add-in SATA controllers can have some pretty bad latency some times.

[razerfanboi]

About the 5.25" bays, does anyone have any experience with the following manufacturers:

Startech
AMS
SNT
Vantec
IcyDock

I've never used any products by any of them so I'm not certain of the quality of their products.

[Waco]

To be honest all of them are roughly equal. You're essentially just paying for a bit of steel to hold your drives in place - no real circuitry is needed. Personally I'd just get this http://www.newegg.co...82E16817997041 and call it a day.

EDIT: For a controller card these are fairly decent and get you the connectivity you need without being overly terrible: http://www.newegg.co...N82E16816132018

Or, if you're not as concerned about speed: http://www.newegg.co...N82E16816124027 Reviews for this one make it sound a bit flaky though...

[razerfanboi]

To be honest all of them are roughly equal. You're essentially just paying for a bit of steel to hold your drives in place - no real circuitry is needed. Personally I'd just get this http://www.newegg.co...82E16817997041 and call it a day.

EDIT: For a controller card these are fairly decent and get you the connectivity you need without being overly terrible: http://www.newegg.co...N82E16816132018

Or, if you're not as concerned about speed: http://www.newegg.co...N82E16816124027 Reviews for this one make it sound a bit flaky though...

Thanks a lot man.
I think I'm going to go with the Rosewill. Nothing else is catching my eye much.
Now I just need to figure out this PICe lane mumbo-jumbo.

[Waco]

You might end up reducing your GTX 460 to 8x mode instead of 16x mode. Honestly I wouldn't worry about it one bit as it won't affect your performance much at all.

[razerfanboi]

You might end up reducing your GTX 460 to 8x mode instead of 16x mode. Honestly I wouldn't worry about it one bit as it won't affect your performance much at all.

Hmm, I didn't know that. I was never really up to date on how GPUs measure their performance or what their current throughput is.

[Waco]

The change from 16x PCIe 1.0 to 8x PCIe 1.0 might drop your framerates by a couple percent, at most. With PCIe 2.0 you'll never see the difference especially on a single GPU card.

[razerfanboi]

Just ordered my two 830s, the Rosewill SATA, and the cheap drive bay.

Thanks for the help.

Cheers.