ASUS P4PE MB + SUPERMICRO AOC-SAT2-MV8

[FrostBite]

I'm thinking of converting my 6+ year old motherboard, the ASUS P4PE (Asus Link -> http://www.asus.com/products.aspx?l1=3&l2=12&l3=36&model=190&modelmenu=2) into a WHS fileserver. I want to purchase 1 (later 2) SUPERMICRO AOC-SAT2-MV8 (Newegg Link -> http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16815121009), and throw it in the PCI slots.

I just want to confirm

SAT2-MV8's will work on the old PCI slots? If so, any performance loss?
The MB doesn't have any SATA, but would I be OK for my Seagate IDE for a boot drive?


The server would look like:
Asus MB (have)
P4 2.4 (have)
2 Gig RAM (have)
Gigabite NIC in PCI Slot (have)
CD ROM Drive (have)
Old ugly case that can hold 4 drives (have, may upgrade later to Norco)
PCP&C 750w (need to buy)
SUPERMICRO AOC-SAT2-MV8 (need to buy)
3x Hard drives (need to buy)
WHS (need to buy)
This is strictly for fileserving, max up to 2 BluRay movies streamed to 2 computers, and no VM. Any other thoughts on this? I would greatly appreciate it. Thanks again.

[epimetheus]

The SAT2 cards will work in regular PCI slots but they are limited to the PCI bus bandwidth of 133MB/s. This is not a problem with WHS as single hard drives can barely hit this speed these days. I bet the IDE drive will be fine for your boot drive, however you have to consider that the majority of that boot drive will go into the storage pool. WHS creates a 20GB system partition o nthe install drive and allocates the rest of that physical drive to the storage pool. So if you use an IDE drive for the system drive, a portion of your storage pool will have IDE speeds.

Overall the build looks good to me.

[FrostBite]

Would it be better to just ditch the IDE for another SATA and run it from the SAT2 card as boot?

Also, I'm running this on a Gigabit Networkon a D-Link GamerLounge Router. I don't really understand how the hardware will limit the network speed (could someone provide me a link for reading?), but will the router be fast enough to stream if all computers have Gigabit NIC's?

[epimetheus]

I don't have a link for you, but gigabit has a theoretical max of 125 megabytes per second. WHS is limited to single drive speeds by the design of the drive extender. The newer hard drives are capable of almost 150MB/s. Your build, as described above, should be just fine streaming blue ray over a gigabit network. Most 1080p video is around 5 megabytes per second, and even that is a little high.