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I read the beauty of PCIe is that a designer can combine two, four, eight or sixteen of PCIe lanes into a single data port.

2.5 Gb/s PCIe×1
5 Gb/s PCIe×2

I have two sata 3 drives that I want to put into a RAID 0, just not sure how to check how many lanes my RAID controller is, wanting to get the maximum speeds and not limited by only having 1 lane, which i am trying to grasp

DP67DE motherboard

also bought this to test too: HighPoint Rocket 640L Lite Version 4-Port PCI-Express 2.0 x4 SATA 6Gb/s RAID Controller

Heather McVay
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2 Answers2

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SATA-3 (or SATA-III) is a 6Gbps protocol. That's the upper-bound of a connected device. For an individual hard disk, actual transfer speeds won't be anywhere near that.

Answering this question hinges on what you're planning to do. A RAID controller that has multiple 6Gbps ports is a possible scenario where you'd expect a certain PCIe bus speed in order to prevent over-saturation.

Identifying your controller's capabilities is possible by reading the controller's specifications or examining the slow that it's connected to.

Here are 1x,4x,8x and 16x slots:

enter image description here

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ewwhite
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  • I have two sata 3 drives that I want to put into a RAID 0, just not sure how to check how many lanes my RAID controller is, wanting to get the maximum speeds and not limited by only having 1 lane, which i am trying to grasp – Heather McVay Mar 13 '13 at 19:24
  • You won't reach that limitation. Your drives will have real-life transfer rates of 1GBps-1.5Gbps. What type of controller do you have? – ewwhite Mar 13 '13 at 19:27
  • DP67DE motherboard – Heather McVay Mar 13 '13 at 19:32
  • also bought this to test too: HighPoint Rocket 640L Lite Version 4-Port PCI-Express 2.0 x4 SATA 6Gb/s RAID Controller – Heather McVay Mar 13 '13 at 19:33
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    This means you have a 4-lane SAS (or *x4* or *4x*) card. You won't be in a position where the controller is the bottleneck. – ewwhite Mar 13 '13 at 19:49
  • great, the main question was really more towards finding out about the board sata3, since adding this card into the mix costs over $60, i would like to get the full potential from the motherboard, just can't tell if it's 1 or 2 lane – Heather McVay Mar 13 '13 at 20:00
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From reading the datasheet for your motherboard, the onboard SATA3 is connected straight into the PCH (platform controller hub). There is no PCI-e involved here.

The connection from the CPU to the PCH is over a DMI connection, which is 10Gbps in each direction. This probably won't be a bottleneck, but it's possible.

The motherboard has a x16 slot and two x1 slots. If you want the best possible performance, you should put your Highpoint card into the x16 slot on your motherboard. If you put it into one of the other slots, it will only function as a 1x card. $60 isn't a lot of money if you actually want performance.

This is a fairly low-spec desktop board, if you really care about performance you should get a better motherboard.

However, your onboard SATA is probably fine for you needs. I'd go with that for now.

Daniel Lawson
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  • I had to use the x16 slot for a graphics card, since there was no onboard graphics. Though I just looked it up, and I guess you can install a x1 graphics card such as the "Radeon HD 4350 PCI-E x1 Edition", so thanks for that response. – Heather McVay Mar 14 '13 at 19:05