Is it worth upgrading to sata 3?

[jbuszkie]

I'm going to upgrade my whole unraid system..  Right now I have some supermicro 8 port add in card

that I believe is pci-e 1.0 and sata 3Gb/s

Is it worth upgrading to a pci-e 2.0 card that is Sata 6Gb/s?

 

I'm going to have a NVMe 250GB disk as a cache and use some of the onboard 6GB/s (6 of them, I believe)  for parity

and the other big disks and use the other card for the smaller (older) disks.

 

So it is worth upgrading if I have such a fast cache drive?  I'm looking at a SAS9201-8i on e-bay for $44..  I assume my cables would still work?

 

It's mainly used for media backup but the new server will host my home DVR as well 

 

Thanks,

 

Jim

[SSD]

Is the Supermicro card you have an AOC-SASLP-MV8. That card can have compatibility issues with unRaid, and would suggest replacing it.

 

You might read this to better understand if you need a PCIe 2.0 card. In general I would say yes.

 

 

 

[jbuszkie]

1 hour ago, bjp999 said:

Is the Supermicro card you have an AOC-SASLP-MV8. That card can have compatibility issues with unRaid, and would suggest replacing it.

 

You might read this to better understand if you need a PCIe 2.0 card. In general I would say yes.

 

 

 

 

I'd have to look and see what card I have.  But I've been running fine with it for years now. So I doubt there are any compatibility issues unless there is when plugging into my new MB.

I'm currently looking at a SAS9201-8i 6GB PCIe Express 2.0  I found one on e-bay for $44....  so I might just buy it.

 

 

 

[jbuszkie]

Does anyone know off the top of their head..

Is the 9201-8i  a x8 card?  or is it a x4 card? (I know it has 8 disk ports.. I'm talking about PCIe- lanes..)

 

Update:  It looks like like it's a x8 chip..  I had to go to broadcom's website to find it! :-)

Edited June 8, 2017 by jbuszkie

[SSD]

4 hours ago, jbuszkie said:

Does anyone know off the top of their head..

Is the 9201-8i  a x8 card?  or is it a x4 card? (I know it has 8 disk ports.. I'm talking about PCIe- lanes..)

 

Update:  It looks like like it's a x8 chip..  I had to go to broadcom's website to find it! :-)

 

Yes - its a x8 card. But it wold work fine with only 4 lanes (some motherboards have x8 or x16 slots which are only wired for x4.) You'd really only need the 8 lanes if running in in a PCIe 1.x slot.

 

The 9201 is a good card. I have the -16i and -16e versions which are also x8 card, each running twice as many drives as the -8i version the the same number of lanes.