PCIe X4 X1? Gb Lan

[gaspah]

would it make a difference if i got a 4-port PCIeX1 card over a simmilar spec PCIeX4 card when using as a fileserver over a Gb lan??? (rocketraid 2300 vs 2310)?

1 pcie lane is 250MB/s right?
Gb lan is 125MB/s right?

so would 4 lanes be any benefit and why?

 

[axan]

x1 for 4 ports is just fine, 1x pcie = 400mb/s bandwidth, you will have hard time fully saturating that with only 4 drives. Since its a file server I'm assuming you will be doing raid 5 on those 4 drives? your read will be less then 200mb/s so you won't have any problems. Only thing that comes close to saturating x1 pcie bandwidth would be 4 very fast drives in raid 0.

 

[gaspah]

x1 for 4 ports is just fine, 1x pcie = 400mb/s bandwidth, you will have hard time fully saturating that with only 4 drives. Since its a file server I'm assuming you will be doing raid 5 on those 4 drives? your read will be less then 200mb/s so you won't have any problems. Only thing that comes close to saturating x1 pcie bandwidth would be 4 very fast drives in raid 0.

yeah raid5.. just for media and whatnot.. building for a friend

thanx

 

[The Hunter]

Ignore all of this, completely misread the question

My first question is why do you need the 4 ports? If you're planning to bond them together, you need networking switches, etc. that can support that. I don't know everything that's involved, but it's not just a matter of plugging 4 cables in and going (apologies if you already know this).

As for the x1 vs. x4 question, a PCIe x1 slot has a theoretical max bandwidth of 2000Mbit/s, and AFAIK it's not like ethernet etc. where there's much protocol overhead and what not, so you're likely to get close to the maximum. A GigE port runs at 1000Mbit/s, and with a good card (which it should be if you're looking at 4 ports, probably intel?) you can get close to that before adding on protocols like SMB/CIFS(Windows networking), NFS or FTP. Once you add those on it can be a bit of a crap shoot, but you should be able to get most of the bandwidth available to you (depending on the machine on the other end of course).

So if you have all four ports working full out, you'll be well over the limits of x1. However, assuming you're not doing 24/7 data transfers, you'll likely be within the limits of x1. The final answer really depends on what kind of usage pattern you're expecting.

 

[gaspah]

My first question is why do you need the 4 ports? If you're planning to bond them together, you need networking switches, etc. that can support that. I don't know everything that's involved, but it's not just a matter of plugging 4 cables in and going (apologies if you already know this).

4-port SATA not 4-port Gigabit lan that is what you meant right?

4-port = 4x1TB drives

 

[gaspah]

So if you have all four ports working full out, you'll be well over the limits of x1. However, assuming you're not doing 24/7 data transfers, you'll likely be within the limits of x1. The final answer really depends on what kind of usage pattern you're expecting.

way more casual than 24/7... the most torture maybe watching a HD matroska file...

 

[The Hunter]

way more casual than 24/7... the most torture maybe watching a HD matroska file...

Gahhh Ignore pretty much everything I've said. It seems I haven't fully woken up yet - I was thinking you were talking about a 4port Gigabit lan card, not a sata card. My apologies.

 

[gaspah]

Gahhh Ignore pretty much everything I've said. It seems I haven't fully woken up yet - I was thinking you were talking about a 4port Gigabit lan card, not a sata card. My apologies.

well thanks for helping albeit in a half-animated state...