PCIe SATA Card

SATA3 is 6Gbps. PCIe Gen3 x1 is 8Gbps. PCIe is not the problem, something else is.

Look at Host Bus Adapters if you want to connect a lot of SATA drives, they're proper server grade. Typical consumer SATA cards aren't the same quality. LSI a commnon chip vendor, and there are ex server cards from Dell, HP and IBM.

But something is very wrong if things are that slow - perhaps the problem is not the SATA card?

Theo

Yes, definitely, something is very much awry.

Defective drive :-(

Explorer spent 5 hours this afternoon copying from source to dest and has in fact copied nothing but it didn't raise any errors which seems odd.

Drive is < 2years old, was in my NAS, when I took it out I removed zillions of partitions and set it up as one GPT partition but something went wrong somewhere.

I've turned the PC off for now as it has has shuffled some drive letters so I'll take a fresh look tomorrow.

Are "Host Bus Adapters" SATA or NIC cards? I think I would rather have a card that doesn't sit there like a sausage if it comes across a defective drive!

Thanks :-)

They're SATA (and often SAS too). I'd expect better error reporting, but note that the enterprise answer to 'drive failed' is 'throw it out of the RAID and prompt the operator to plug in another' (or migrate to a hot spare if you have one) rather than try to work with a failing drive. So they may be more trigger happy when a drive does start to fail.

(I assume most of them come with Windows drivers; I've only ever used them on Linux)

Theo

I have just realised that there is an LSI SAS 9207-8i in my Dell Poweredge T320 which is a bit older but might do the job. The Dell is going to the tip, it's too big and heavy for what I wanted but I will scavenge it first. I remember I blew a new BIOS on the card which means it works as JBOD and doesn't need a battery. Job for tomorrow!

The Dell ran Win 10 and it recognised the card.

Ice o9nly ever used SATA equipped SSDs to replace spinning rust in my machines and all have shown way faster access times

I had a drive fail like that in my NAS once - it basically clobbered the performance of the NAS to the point where it could not function or respond to most requests - even to the point it could not really identify the problem drive.

In the end I had to pull all the drives out, and mount them on a PC so I could run RAID recovery software on them.

SATA (or SCSI!)

There may not be much smarts in the host adaptor - it comes down to the OS and how it tries to deal with a apparently working - but ridiculously slow to respond drive. (i.e. the smarts in the drive are working overtime to "hide" errors from the host by re-seeking / re-reading over and over to try and access the data)

I have had to order a couple of cables, should arrive tomorrow.

Looking on YouTube there are several set up videos and they all warn of the heat produced by these card, did you do anything special in terms of cooling?

Not really. Most server chassis have a bit of airflow which should be sufficient. With the HP P410 in my Gen7 Microserver the chip and heatsink are rammed right in an airless corner so I replaced the solid PCIe bracket with one with holes to allow more airflow from the outside.

Theo

if you have physical space, nothing to stop you putting a small fan onto the card's main chip? they are usually identifiable by the passive heat sink on them.

Cables arrived, boots with 4 x SSD but slooow, won't boot with 4 x SSD + 4 x Spinners.

Think I'll get an Asmedia 1166 card and keep it simple.

As a side issue the order of drives in Win 10 Disk Management and MiniTools Partition Wizard is different and neither lines up with what I thought I had set up. It helps trouble shooting if I know what drive is connected to what slot.

Is there a definitive way of knowing this?

RAID cards, you might run them in JBOD mode to use the thing as a conventional SATA PHY.

These kinds of adapters are normally 300 to 500. A low price like this is suspicious, unless these are going out of production. There is no question that SATA is dying, even though hard drives are not going away (HAMR 32TB, PMR 22TB).

Customer comments mention a driver signing issue. 64-bit drivers must be signed. Win10 32-bit will be the last 32-bit way of getting the job done.

RAID cards with hardware support, have an XOR block as part of the RAID thing. This normally results in a heatsink on top. A "soft-RAID" card relies on an OS piece of code, to do the XOR, the driver sparing or rebuild or whatever. Maybe some OS RAM is used as a buffer for RAID file fetches (real RAID cards have a DRAM DIMM for a cache module).

If the card has hardware support for RAID, this reduces CPU overhead, and allows a compute box to do computing and disk I/O in the same box. Adapters, even lowly ones, use DMA for transferring file reads into OS RAM buffers, and this is what normally keeps the overhead low. Your erroneous result indicates something is not right, either an interrupt storm, or a driver level issue. For example, maybe somebody has been shipping a WinXP driver with their hardware since yonks, and now it decides to act up on Windows 11 :-)

You can measure interrupts in Windows, easily, but the graph scale calibration is a mystery meat. The graphics card test used to interrupt at 2000 interrupts/sec. There is a difference between DX11 and DX12 on the interrupt rate you expect. DX12 would be lower than DX11. I have not tested or calibrated graphics across the ages -- I could have done that, using my WinXP...Win10 machine but that machine is dead now and my analysis range is now "crimped".

I'll just toss this out and you can play with it. A graphics card used to be 2000 per second. The interrupt limiter (per card) was around 10000 to 15000 per second or so. In this demo, the NVidia SmokeParticle.exe in the Visual Studio SDK they provide, was used to generate a load so I could "step" the interrupt rate on demand. Yes, you have to compile from source, to get the EXE. There are other ways, but interrupt characteristic unknown (Furmark or a 3DMark run). In any case, when the system is idle, there might be a few USB interrupts when your mouse whizzes around.

Boot time with a RAID card can be slower as it needs to run the RAID BIOS and identify the drives. It shouldn't make the machine slower to use - if it does something is wrong with the drives. You may be able to disable running the RAID BIOS if you aren't booting off the RAID drives (either in the RAID BIOS settings or in regular BIOS settings).

I would generally suggest using the array for storage and not as a boot drive - use an NVMe SSD for that.

Asmedia are generally sane as far as consumer grade stuff goes, better than JMicron in my book.

No idea. Does the HBA manufacturer have any addon tools? Or somewhere in Properties maybe?

Theo

Haven't you ever had to make a cooling bracket for a PC ???

You cut the material and place the screw hole, so the end of the piece fits snugly against the PC case (that's what stops it from drooping, is the snug fit to the case plus one screw inserted). This particular adapter is for another PC case (Antec Sonata) and does not fit the case I used for the photo properly.

While you can make brackets that use two screw holes (and the end does not have to fit snug against the case wall), that's more work.

The hole I drilled is beveled, to suit the screw on the Sonata. The screw on the Phantecs fits, but not the beveled part.

You fit a fan and use small cable ties, to hold the fan body snug against the 1" surface of the angle piece. The fan needs a three position plug for the wiring and such (some fans are purchased without the plug on the end, and you have to fit one yourself).

Fans come in low, medium, high, ultra, and for this application you would be using a low or medium. The fan draws 12V @ 0.21 amps so that one is close to a "medium" 80mm square fan. Could be 35CFM or less. An ultra is 110CFM and you wear ear protectors while sitting next to it :-) An ultra is 12V @ 1.00 amps.

I started making these, when fanless video cards were invented. I bought two fanless cards. One ran fine without a fan. The other one got too hot and used to crash the system in a game. Once the cooling bracket was fitted and pointed at the video card passive heatsink, there were no more crashes during games. Naturally, these cheap cards without a fan, they're not really gamer material, but you have to pretend sometimes.

Paul

No!

I don't do anything to push a PC very hard, 95% of the time I'm in Visual Studio, the rest Office.

How old is this computer.?

It is based on the Asus Z170K board so around 8 years?

Nope, never had the need or the thought to do that. Most people don't have the tools to do that. DIY, PC wise, is going generally out of fashion. They prefer a bought solution.

Ultimately how much is your time worth? I enjoy fixing some things. especially treasured items that can no longer be obtained. But a perfectly good 8 year old PC can be got for £75...