extending SATA III capability

[capr]

I have multiple internal SATA 3 drives but only 2 ports. What's my best option?

 

This is my mobo (asus p8p67 LE (rev 3))

 

PCI Express 2.0 x16 

1 x PCIe 2.0 x16 (blue, single at x16 mode)
1 x PCIe 2.0 x16 (black, at x4 mode, compatible with PCI Express x1 and x4 devices)

PCI Express x1 2 (The PCIe x1 slots share the bandwidth with the PCIe x16_2 slot.)

 

 

 

SATA 6Gb/s 2 xSATA 6.0 Gb/s ports (gray) by P67.   1 xSATA 6.0 Gb/s ports (navy blue) by Marvell PCIe SATA 6Gb/s controller

 

 

Can I hook up 3 sata III drives? 

 

Can I hook up one of these ? 

PCI-Express 2.0 SATA III (6.0Gb/s) Controller Card

will the pci-express option have performance impacts? 

 

[f0rk_b0mb]

I personally benchmarked my SSD plugged into a PCI-E SATA port vs plugged into my motherboard. The PCI port was 10mbs slower than connected to my motherboard. So in all reality, you are not going to notice a difference. Make sure you check and see if drivers are easily available for it. I had to run all over hell trying to track one down for my MSI. 

[snaphat (Myles Landwehr) Member]

Interestingly, the newer sata standard (3.2) is piggybacking on PCI-E. It's called SATA Express. The reason primarily being that PCI-E has phenomenal speeds. I would imagine any performance degradation is coming from the controller on the card and not the lanes themselves (assuming you drop the card isn't 1x).

[snaphat (Myles Landwehr) Member]

I'd probably go with something which is listed as 4x card. I'm reading that PCI-E 2.0 1x maxes at 500MB/s which is lower than sata III gives theoretically (750MB/s). Considering you can hook up multiple drives to the card, it could definitely hamper the performance.

 

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16815124130

[capr]

I'd probably go with something which is listed as 4x card. I'm reading that PCI-E 2.0 1x maxes at 500MB/s which is lower than sata III gives theoretically (750MB/s). Considering you can hook up multiple drives to the card, it could definitely hamper the performance.

 

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16815124130

that's an awesome card, 2 sata 3 ports and 2 usb 3 ports. I don't' expect the drives attached to be working simultaneously so I am not too worried about bandwidth, good call though. 

 

Does my mobo have the slot for this though? my main concern is whether I can hook it up or not. 

[snaphat (Myles Landwehr) Member]

that's an awesome card, 2 sata 3 ports and 2 usb 3 ports. I don't' expect the drives attached to be working simultaneously so I am not too worried about bandwidth, good call though. 

 

Does my mobo have the slot for this though? my main concern is whether I can hook it up or not. 

 

You listed two PCI-E 16x slots. One of those with 4x compatible, so you'd need to make sure it isn't in use.

 

Also, disclaimer, I'm not vouching for that card in particular. I would browse more to make sure it is good or that there aren't better ones.

[f0rk_b0mb]

that's an awesome card, 2 sata 3 ports and 2 usb 3 ports. I don't' expect the drives attached to be working simultaneously so I am not too worried about bandwidth, good call though. 

 

Does my mobo have the slot for this though? my main concern is whether I can hook it up or not. 

 

Yes. Your first card in your op will fit in any of the two ports highlighted in red. The one listed above will fit in the black port.

 

 

 

[capr]

Yes. Your first card in your op will fit in any of the two ports highlighted in red. The one listed above will fit in the black port.

 

 

awesome thank you! Did you look at the 3 SATA 6Gb/s ports? there is a color difference, but I don't understand what the actual difference is with those ports. is it just the chip is by marvell? The description says it's a PCIe port so does that take away from the available PCIe bandwidth? 

 

I dont' want to degrade my video card performance by using these ports for other stuff.

[Ambroos]

PCIe isn't shared. Each port has it's own lanes to the CPU.

 

It's mostly compatibility. Sometimes you can't use the drive in the Marvell port to boot from, and I can imagine you wouldn't be able to boot from a PCIe controller either. But they'll work fine for storage inside Windows.

[snaphat (Myles Landwehr) Member]

awesome thank you! Did you look at the 3 SATA 6Gb/s ports? there is a color difference, but I don't understand what the actual difference is with those ports. is it just the chip is by marvell? The description says it's a PCIe port so does that take away from the available PCIe bandwidth? 

 

I dont' want to degrade my video card performance by using these ports for other stuff.

 

It works like this: the P67 chipset supports 6 SATA ports (http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/chipsets/mainstream-chipsets/p67-express-chipset.html), but your board has 7 ports. ASUS configured it so that the four 3GB/s ports and two 6GB/s ports map to the P67 chipset controller. That leaves the additional 6GB/s (navy blue) port needing a controller, so what they did was put an additional Marvell PCIe SATA controller on board*. That port is definitely using the PCI-E bus, but there is no indication that lanes are shared with the PCI-E ports. And it is worth noting that ASUS straight up tells you that the PCI-E 1x ports share lanes with one of the x16 connectors, so I think they would have made it clear if the navy blue sata port did also.

 

PATA: 1 x ATA133 2 Dev. Max

SATA 3Gb/s: 4

SATA 6Gb/s:

    2 xSATA 6.0 Gb/s ports (gray) by P67

    1 xSATA 6.0 Gb/s ports (navy blue) by Marvell PCIe SATA 6Gb/s controller

 

 

* Note: my explanation above is slightly incorrect. The reality is that the Marvel controller handles the esata port, navy blue sata port, and pata port. ASUS most likely just added the extra sata port because the controller they needed for pata/esata happened to handle it anyway. I think the marvell controller also handles RAID configurations.

 

EDIT:

 

Upon looking closer, it appears when 4x mode is enabled on PCI-E x16 slot 2, this disables both the PCI-E 1x slots. I would surmise this is because 2 PCIe lanes are shared between the the 3 slots. So, I'd say this most definitely confirms that the marvel controller isn't sharing any lanes with the slots; otherwise, a similar limitation would exist.

[capr]

thank you guys so much. learned a lot from the explanations. Special thanks for snaphat. 

 

Great note about not being able to boot from the PCIe SATA ports. I would have been stumped in 3 days when it all didn't boot. 

[+Mirumir Subscriber¹]

Great note about not being able to boot from the PCIe SATA ports. I would have been stumped in 3 days when it all didn't boot. 

 

It won't boot if you connect an HDD with the existing Windows installation to the PCIe-SATA adapter.

 

If you do a fresh install and feed Windows the drivers for the PCIe-SATA card during the installation process, it will boot just fine.