Hey,
I have a PCI-e x4 to 8 SATA connector to connect 8 HDD over the PCI-E 3.0 x4 interface. I have 3x Sata3 ports open on my mobo and I’m wondering if I should take 3 of the drives and move them over to the mobo for performance. If I understand correctly the sata3 interfaces have a 6Gbps connector on individual backbones, and the pci card has 4Gbps shared between the 8 drives, 4 lanes of 1Gbps each. Wouldn’t it make sense to move 3 of the drives to the mobo for a small performance gain?
You want to move your drives to your mainboard because a lot of those cheap adapters suck. Unreliable and they can buckle under load. Can be a PITA.
If there is performance to gain depends on how accurate your information is, what drives you use, and how.
PCIe 3.0 x4 is 4 gigabytes per second (or 32 gigabits). You will not saturate that connection with 8 HDD’s.