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Adding RAID Card for Rampage IV Extreme...

Oxonsi
Level 7
In my current configuration, I have 3 x Intel 520 series SSDs, and one WD VelociRaptor. I have one of the SSDs as a boot drive / system disk with Windows 7 installed. I have the other 2 SSDs in a RAID 0 configuration, and I use the HDD to store really large files.

I had my boot SSD attached to one of the ASMedia SATA III ports, and the two SSDs in RAID 0 on the Intel SATA III ports. That is, until I found that ASMedia controller is not designed for running a boot disk. After that, I moved the boot SSD to one of the Intel SATA ports. The problem for my configuration is that there are only two Intel SATA III ports, and I can't use the ASMedia ports for the boot disk or RAID.

Now I have my boot SSD on one of the red Intel ports, and one of the RAID set on the other red Intel port, the other of the RAID set on a black SATA II port. I've done some benchmark testing, and it looks like the SSDs average about 500 MB/s reads on a SATA III port. But on the SATA II ports, they get capped to about 280 MB/s reads.

So I'm thinking I might invest in a PCIe RAID card to get more performance out of the SSDs I have. But before I do, I wanted to verify that it should work in my configuration. That is, I currently have two GTX 680s, in slots 1 and 4. I have a X-Fi Titanium HD sound card in slot 6, and I have Bigfoot Killer 2100 Network card in slot 2.

That leaves me with slot 3, which I understand is shared bandwidth with slot 2. Would that cause me any problem in adding a RAID card to slot 3?

I'm a novice, so just let me know if I'm being stupid about something.

Any other thoughts? Thanks!
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3 REPLIES 3

Praz
Level 13
You can use a maximum of 4 PCIe x16 slots. 2A and 2B cannot be used at the same time.

Thanks for your reply.

It is a total of 40 PCIe 3.0 lanes, correct? The 2B slots exists so that a card can be added if not all lanes are already used?

The RAID card I am considering requires an x8 PCIe 2.0 compliant interface. I'm not sure how that translates to PCIe 3.0, and I'm not sure how many lanes I'm already using. I know the GTX 680s each use 16, so that's 32 right there. I'm not sure about the sound card and NIC.

So I guess if I really wanted to add a RAID card, I'd probably be best off removing one of the other cards.

HiVizMan
Level 40
The VGA are rated for 16x when in single card mode. When you start adding multiple cards (chipset dependant) the lanes will switch down to 8x. You will be hard pressed to notice any difference in performance between 8x and 16x in the real world by the way. The RIVE does use 2 by16x when in dual card, and you are correct that adding additional cards (sound or anything else) to the other PCIe slots will change the set up of the lane allocation.
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