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Pci express and raid controllers

E

Exocet956

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Jan 25, 2001
Messages
1,387
I’m planning on building a new file server at the end of November. I already know what drives and what raid controller i want to use by i am having trouble determining what motherboard and what chipset would be the best pair with this raid adaptor. My budget for both motherboard and cpu cannot exceed $450. The raid adaptor is areca 1220.


Does a pci express x16 slot operate at the lower speeds such as x1 x2 x4 or x8 speeds? If it does not which chipsets and or motherboards are the best pair for an areca raid 6 pcie x8 card? Or am I better off looking for a board with a real x8 slot?
 
Some x16 implementations force the second x16 to operate at x8 when both x16s are filled (ie: SLI). You will never, ever saturate even an x1 lane with your RAID array.
 
how about non sli based motherboards? i can't seem to get a straight answer will a single x16 slot operate at any other speed other than x16? i really have no use for pcie based video for a file server so i have no problem getting a non sli board. I would just like my 600 dollar raid controller to work at optimum performance regardless of how much i will saturate the bus. A side question realistically, what kind of transfer speed could i get from a 8 disk raid 6 array of 7200 rpm drives? My goal with my file server is to get better than 80% utilization of gigabit network. pcie based gig nics will ease the bottle neck of the network card.
 
A single x16 will operate at x16 and is backwards compatible with whatever PCI-E card you shove in there.
You will more than likely not have a problem whatsoever saturating a gigabit connection...but you also might experience bottlenecking with cache bursts and/or streams. Which RAID controller do you have?
 
Beautiful controller.
You will certainly reap the benefits of its power with the configuration you mentioned above. Keep in mind, though, that you have a very real chance of saturating the gig-e.
 
It will be sweet when I build the new server. I would like to have a energy efficient, quiet, and decent performing fileserver. Would a Celeron m 1.5 paired with this mobo http://usa.aopen.com/products/mb/i915Ga-HFS.htm
be sufficient processing power for a fileserver with the above raid controller?

I already have a few Pentium m and Celeron m based systems. This seems like the dream combo for thermal efficiency and for being a very quiet file server. I just wonder if a sub 2.0 ghz processor is sufficient for a fileserver with this raid card.
 
Depends on the NIC you're using.
Gigabit, especially heavily used gigabit, will tax the hell out of a lesser processor.
I'd either use a better CPU or get NICs with TCP Offload engines.

Edit: I'd drop at least 2GHz into that for what you're planning to do. It would be a shame to be pumping so much data into a system that can't keep up.
 
Hmm maybe a 3800+ x2 and a8n sli premium combo then? how loud is the stock amd cooler? How good of network controller is the nf4 gigabit?
 
Well, if you're going to have that system completely separate from the main one, the onboard should be fine. However, for the cost of that upgrade you mentioned, you can get a higher end NIC for the Intel motherboard you linked to. Once the dedicated NIC is in there then you don't really have to worry about killing your CPU.

Check this out: http://h30094.www3.hp.com/product.asp?sku=2585322
 
"Well, if you're going to have that system completely separate from the main one, the onboard should be fine"

Im not quite following you here. that is a nice nic. do you know if it use hp drivers or intel drivers? i am wary of their driver support. i already have some socket 479 pocs so ideally it would be nice to use them. but i am totally open to having an different mobo processor combo. are any of the onboard nics, save server boards, capable as the nic you linked above? I am fairly out of the loop nic wise. I have no experience in the pci express land. I know intel nics are the best and i have quite a few pci and pci-x ones. im trying to balance costs and going with a on board solution would be the most cost effective route to go.
 
Sorry for my vagueness.
The onboard NIC(s) should suit you without a problem if the processor can handle it. My recommendation was to either use a more powerful CPU than the Celeron you mentioned earlier or to use a dedicated NIC. With regards to the latter option, the HP was just one of a few PCI-e gigabit cards that I know perform well. I'm sure there are other ones.
 
What do you recommend? Im open to pretty much open to any combination. I do not want to use a prescott based processor if i can avoid it.
 
All PCI-E x16 slots will support running narrower devices. However, one thing to keep in mind is that some chipset's x16 slots will run at only x16 or x1 (The minimum required by the PCI-E spec), therefore if you plug a x8 or x4 card into some of those slots you will only be running at x1. This is basically a limitation found in very early Intel PCI-E chipsets -- most motherboards will not have this limitation.
 
Order said:
You will never, ever saturate even an x1 lane with your RAID array.
Click to expand...

I wouldn't be so sure about that. Depending on what drives you have attached, how many, how lucky you are with buffer hits, what type of array you have configured, etc. I could see being able to max out a x1 connection. Keep in mind, x1 is only 250MB/s per direction. There are other elements that come into play that have much more effect on actual bandwidth versus theoretical bandwidth on a PCI-E link when you are using a x1 link as opposed to a wider link (for example, ACK/NAK latencies, packet payload sizes, flow control and credits).
 
I think an x1 link should be sufficient, though; 250 MB/s isn't likely to be a huge performance hit. Even 3 raptors in raid-0 (bad idea) would probably not saturate that. It'd take a big array to do that.

As mentioned, any pci-E slot should logically accept any pci-E card. Some of the cards are physically incompatible, but if you were to cut the end out of the slot, you could put the card in and everything would be fine. There were Dells with x8 slots that people put x16 graphics cards in by doing this.

 
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