0

I have a computer which has:

  1. SSD 550 GB drive connected with SATA directly to motherboard (ASUS Z170-K). This drive has Windows 10 installed and it set to boot.
  2. Two HDD 3 TB drives connected currently again with SATA directly to motherboard. Currently these drives are made to form RAID 1 array.

Computer also has 4 port SATA PCI Express card (Delock 90382) for some reason. Since I'm not an expert I would be very much appreciated for an advice. We are currently storing much more data in the cloud than several years before. RAID was made for safer storage of data, which is now becoming more and more obsolete in our case. Thus I'm thinking to get rid of RAID and just increase storage capacity of this computer. What would be the best way to connect these drives to either motherboard or PCI card? Is there any advantage to use PCI card over direct connection to motherboard?

With many thanks in advance.

Improve this question

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
1

Is there any advantage to use PCI card over direct connection to motherboard?

If you're not using its hardware RAID capabilities, then no, there's no advantage.

Improve this answer
1

Direct connection will always be faster than via that single lane PCIe V2.0 card.
That card only supports a total PCIe throughput of 0.5 Gb/s with is only 1/3 of a SATA V1.0 port. Totally useless for modern harddrives that are SATA V3.0 (6 Gb/s).

Having the 3 TB drives in a RAID1 also doesn't make much sense from a performance perspective. This will be some form of software RAID which puts load on the CPU and slows down writes. (Read might be a little faster than on separate drives though.)
It doesn't provide much redundancy anyway (software raid is usually less reliable than real hardware raid) and if something happens to the motherboard there is a chance you can't recover your data anyway, because the RAID might be motherboard specific and unreadable on another motherboard.
If you have good backups (or the data is replaceable if need be) you might as well go for the extra space by using both drives as separate drives.

Improve this answer

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .