I have a NORCO RPC-4020 (20 hot-swappable drive bays) home server with over 11 (soon to be 13) HDD's in addition to a boot/OS SSD and DVD drive. The mobo has four SATA3 ports (two of which are used for the SSD and DVD drives), two PCIe and two PCI slots. I currently have two Supermicro AOC-SAT2-MV8 8-port SATA2 PCI-X controllers in the PCI slots, and have ordered a Syba SI-PEX40071 8-port SATA3 controller (and plan to get another if it works), after finding them refurbished for cheap. So, if all goes well, I'll have 2 free SATA3 connectors on the motherboard, another 16 SATA3 connectors on the PCIe controllers, and another 16 SATA2 connectors on the PCI controllers -- yes, complete overkill, but that's just the accidental way it turned out in terms of when I bought what.
As it happens, 7 of the HDD's are only SATA2, and the other 4 (soon to be 6) are SATA3.
I'm curious, should I put the 4 (soon to be 6) SATA3 HDD's on the same SATA3 PCIe controller, or should I spread them out between the two SATA3 PCIe controllers and the 2 free SATA3 ports on the motherboard?
This is a home media server, so the heaviest data traffic is when I am moving lots of big files between HDD's on the server, rather than watching movies over the network. Given that, the question becomes, are transfers faster between HDD's on the same controller, or spread them out so the controller doesn't "saturate"? Is there any reason to even use the SATA2 PCI controllers with the SATA2 HDD's, or should I put all the HDD's on PCIe cards, since PCIe 2.0 is so much faster than PCI?
As it happens, 7 of the HDD's are only SATA2, and the other 4 (soon to be 6) are SATA3.
I'm curious, should I put the 4 (soon to be 6) SATA3 HDD's on the same SATA3 PCIe controller, or should I spread them out between the two SATA3 PCIe controllers and the 2 free SATA3 ports on the motherboard?
This is a home media server, so the heaviest data traffic is when I am moving lots of big files between HDD's on the server, rather than watching movies over the network. Given that, the question becomes, are transfers faster between HDD's on the same controller, or spread them out so the controller doesn't "saturate"? Is there any reason to even use the SATA2 PCI controllers with the SATA2 HDD's, or should I put all the HDD's on PCIe cards, since PCIe 2.0 is so much faster than PCI?