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PCIe SATA III 6G Port add in cards -1GB/s?

Posted: Thu Jun 27, 2013 11:30 am
by jmc2
Was looking at Newegg's PCIe SATA III 6GB Port add in cards and it was quite
confusing about the card's actual transfer rate VS just the sata III port's.

One card had a caddy on it that would let me just stick in 2 SSDs and off you go.
Sound great But ...

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6816124069
"Transfer Rate Up to 6Gb/s" <--- that sound like rubbish.
But then you read "Supports Communication Bandwidth up to 10.0Gbps"

When ever I see "up to" I don't trust that.
Anyone here use this card or suggest a card that they KNOW will transfer at 1GB/s rate?
(Asus Sabertooth X79 motherboard, W7/64)

Thanks,
jmc2

Re: PCIe SATA III 6G Port add in cards -1GB/s?

Posted: Thu Jun 27, 2013 11:47 am
by Waco
It's a PCIe 2.0 x2 card, so the theoretical maximum is 1 GB/s of raw throughput.

After encoding overhead you're looking at around 800 MB/s maximum for that card. If you want over 1 GB/s you're going to need a card with either PCIe 3.0 x2 (assuming your board supports it) or PCIe 2.0 x4.

Re: PCIe SATA III 6G Port add in cards -1GB/s?

Posted: Thu Jun 27, 2013 12:08 pm
by kuraegomon
In addition to not meeting your throughput requirement on paper, there's virtually no chance of getting a _quality_ product at that price point. Also, are you planning to RAID those SSD's? It sounds like you are. If so, you are _very_ likely to need a better card, even using software RAID in Linux.

Re: PCIe SATA III 6G Port add in cards -1GB/s?

Posted: Thu Jun 27, 2013 12:52 pm
by jmc2
So looks like PCIe 2.0 x4. for me.
(X79 chipset got screwed over in several ways by intel compared to other X7 gen chipsets)

Yes, planning on "raiding" them. Probably just use W7 disk management to stripe them.
(new area for me so a lot to learn)
Was not planning on using the raid on the card but still learning options.

The Samsung 840 Pros 256G SSDs have (Sustained Sequential<---important)
reads and writes of over 500MB/s.
Which is why I not getting the 128G ones.(390 MB/s writes)

Sounding more and more like a "real 1GB/s" card might have to be one of those
several hundred dollar raid cards and that is just too much money...
not spending a thousand dollars on this. (maybe 5-6 hundred)

Not well off enough to just start buying addin cards and tossing them on the shelf
when they don't work.
(Plus it really ticks me off when I find I've bought rubbish)

Thanks,
jmc2

Re: PCIe SATA III 6G Port add in cards -1GB/s?

Posted: Thu Jun 27, 2013 2:39 pm
by Bauxite
1) Go to ebay

2) Search m1015

3) Acquire whatever cables you need for your case/enclosure setup

4) Problem solved

Use it as a basic RAID controller (0/1/10 combos, 5 not recommended for it) or reflash firmware into plain HBA for full OS control.


x8 pci-e 2.0 lanes has plenty of room for growth past 2 drives. The LSI 2008 chipset is known to perform well.

They used to be cheaper (I bought several bare cards for $65) but considering they are equivalent to LSI 9211-8i branded cards that retail for $250+, its hard to complain.

Re: PCIe SATA III 6G Port add in cards -1GB/s?

Posted: Thu Jun 27, 2013 3:17 pm
by kuraegomon
This. See the following link for a nice collection of links about that card.

http://www.servethehome.com/ibm-serveraid-m1015-75-dollars/

Bauxite wrote:
1) Go to ebay

2) Search m1015

3) Acquire whatever cables you need for your case/enclosure setup

4) Problem solved

Use it as a basic RAID controller (0/1/10 combos, 5 not recommended for it) or reflash firmware into plain HBA for full OS control.


x8 pci-e 2.0 lanes has plenty of room for growth past 2 drives. The LSI 2008 chipset is known to perform well.

They used to be cheaper (I bought several bare cards for $65) but considering they are equivalent to LSI 9211-8i branded cards that retail for $250+, its hard to complain.

Re: PCIe SATA III 6G Port add in cards -1GB/s?

Posted: Thu Jun 27, 2013 4:13 pm
by DragonDaddyBear
I personally vote for software raids using the OS. It removes a potential harware failiure point. A good backup of your OS is all you need to restore (which you are doing, right?). Also, the cheap cards and onboard stuff typically put off the calculations to the CPU anyways, so they are moot if you want high-performance raid.

You should also ensure whatever drive you buy has built in Garbage Collection, too.

Why would you need the 1GB/sec? As far as average-Joe goes, the fact you have an SSD and don't have to wait on platters spinning around to access data is going to be more than enough of a jump for you. I'm running a "first gen" OCZ drive and it's awesome.

Re: PCIe SATA III 6G Port add in cards -1GB/s?

Posted: Fri Jun 28, 2013 10:32 am
by jmc2
I too hope the OS raiding of the SSDs is good enough.
The 840 Pros do have garbage collection and TRIM.

It's for editing video (5-6 GB files). So the speed of saving off the files and being able
to start the next one is very important.
This is just a home project not PRO work.

Looks like I'm off to look into the "m1015".

Thanks to all for the thoughts!

jmc2

Re: PCIe SATA III 6G Port add in cards -1GB/s?

Posted: Fri Jun 28, 2013 11:55 am
by DragonDaddyBear
If your concern is wrting data, and a lot of it often, you have two options

1) Use an SLC drive (very expensive)

2) Invest in a single, larger drive (which should be less expensive per GB)

TRIM is going to be a requirement for you if you are worried about write performence. SLC drives don't have that issue but are more expensive.

When you delete a file, it just removes the location of the data from the file table. TRIM will zero the sectors, preventing the read-write hit on a MLC drive. Look at every TR SSD review to see what I'm talking about. They do a special section on TRIM performence.

I speak from experience. My 1st gen SSD does not support TRIM and the GC only clears up to 100MB/sec write speed, if that. Writing files takes LONGER than a mechanical drive. But I do very little writing to the SSD so I'm OK with that.

Re: PCIe SATA III 6G Port add in cards -1GB/s?

Posted: Sun Jun 30, 2013 1:24 pm
by UberGerbil
Losergamer04 wrote:
I personally vote for software raids using the OS. It removes a potential harware failiure point. A good backup of your OS is all you need to restore (which you are doing, right?). Also, the cheap cards and onboard stuff typically put off the calculations to the CPU anyways, so they are moot if you want high-performance raid.
Yes, the RAID implemented on chipsets and cheap add-in cards essentially is software RAID, just implemented at the driver and firmware level rather than in the OS. So you can boot from it, but it doesn't have any of the throughput and system utilization advantages offered by real hardware RAID (one that uses its own processor and memory).
You should also ensure whatever drive you buy has built in Garbage Collection, too.
They all do, at this point (AFAIK). But the characteristics (aggressiveness and effectiveness) vary from one controller to another.
Losergamer04 wrote:
When you delete a file, it just removes the location of the data from the file table. TRIM will zero the sectors, preventing the read-write hit on a MLC drive. Look at every TR SSD review to see what I'm talking about. They do a special section on TRIM performence.
This isn't precisely correct. TRIM doesn't necessarily cause the sectors to be erased, at least not (necessarily) immediately. What it does do is inform the controller that those sectors (technically, the NAND blocks that make up those "sectors") are no longer in use, allowing the Garbage Collection algorithm in the controller to pick them up as it does its job. If the drive is very low on space, they'll get erased and reused pretty quickly, but if there's adequate free space on the drive they may be sitting around for an indefinite amount of time. (The flash NAND used in SSDs has to be erased before it can be rewritten, but that's a slow extra step which is why a heavily utilized drive may see its write speed drop; to combat this, the GC tries to go keep an adequate supply of zero'd blocks available by scavenging them when the drive is idle, but if there's plenty of free space it may not do so right away. Complicating this is the fact that the block size for erases is larger than it is for writes, and files never fit cleanly into blocks anyway, so the GC has to shuffle things around to try to pack them efficiently -- while also keeping track of the wear on each block and trying to balance that so all of them have been erased/written roughly evenly).

I belabor this because I see a fair amount of confusion about GC vs Trim (they aren't replacements for each other: Trim is an enhancement that allows the GC to be more effective) and I also wouldn't want anyone reading this to just assume having TRIM enabled on a consumer SSD meant that any sensitive information would necessarily be getting zero'd out immediately on file deletion when in fact it might be sitting around hidden from user-level tools but still available for anyone with the bare minimum of forensic utilities.

Re: PCIe SATA III 6G Port add in cards -1GB/s?

Posted: Sun Jun 30, 2013 3:24 pm
by DragonDaddyBear
UberGerbil wrote:
Yes, the RAID implemented on chipsets and cheap add-in cards essentially is software RAID, just implemented at the driver and firmware level rather than in the OS. So you can boot from it, but it doesn't have any of the throughput and system utilization advantages offered by real hardware RAID (one that uses its own processor and memory).

True. But for what this person needed, I advocated for a software "raid" because they intended to use a RAID 0. I would have advocated otherwise if they were wanting a RAID5, depending on their usage. But you can't TRIM in most RAID cases. So I suggested they don't even use a RAID once I learned their primary goal was write speed.

UberGerbil wrote:
They all do, at this point (AFAIK). But the characteristics (aggressiveness and effectiveness) vary from one controller to another.

As a rule, the ones that advertise it do much better. You'll notice that many sites do reviews on SSD's, but not all test GC on every drive because it's rather usless on most. The only time I see it tested is on a controller's first review and if they advertise it as a feature.

UberGerbil wrote:
I belabor this because I see a fair amount of confusion about GC vs Trim (they aren't replacements for each other: Trim is an enhancement that allows the GC to be more effective) and I also wouldn't want anyone reading this to just assume having TRIM enabled on a consumer SSD meant that any sensitive information would necessarily be getting zero'd out immediately on file deletion when in fact it might be sitting around hidden from user-level tools but still available for anyone with the bare minimum of forensic utilities.

Why even bring this up? It's obvious this individual isn't worried about forensics, and I didn't feel like writing a white paper. Sure, I used "zero sectors" in a way that's ambiguous but I was trying to keep it simple. This isn't a forensics thread, or question.

You haven't added anythign to this person's request for help. All you did was rip my post appart for little details that will only serve to confuse the person who asked for help. If you want pissing contest of how I word things then do it outside of this post though a PM.