• PCIe SATA Card

    From Jeff Gaines@21:1/5 to All on Fri Jan 3 18:34:07 2025
    XPost: uk.d-i-y

    I added a couple of SSDs to my server today connected to a PCIe SATA card
    and it has slowed the PC to a crawl, so slow it times out trying to
    connect by RDP!

    Sitting at the PC physically Task Manager doesn't show anything alarming
    but the PC is unusable.

    All these cards seem to fit in the smallest of the PCIe slots which is described as PCIe 3.0 x 1. I also have 2 PCIe x 3.0 x 16 slots (x16 and x
    4 modes).

    I can't find a SATA card that would use 4 or 16 lanes, even this card:

    https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B09FY9FBTN

    which has 4 x host controllers still only needs 1 lane.

    What do I need to look for to get a reasonable speed out of my SSD drives,
    is it lanes or host controllers or chipset or something else?

    Advice appreciated, I can't remember when I had a PC running so slowly -
    it's in the middle of a job at the moment, I'll check what make the card
    is if it ever finishes...

    --
    Jeff Gaines Dorset UK
    This mess is what happens when you elect a Labour government, in the end
    they will always run out of other people's money to spend.
    (Margaret Thatcher on her election in 1979)

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  • From Theo@21:1/5 to Jeff Gaines on Fri Jan 3 19:17:33 2025
    XPost: uk.d-i-y

    In uk.d-i-y Jeff Gaines <jgnewsid@outlook.com> wrote:

    I added a couple of SSDs to my server today connected to a PCIe SATA card
    and it has slowed the PC to a crawl, so slow it times out trying to
    connect by RDP!

    Sitting at the PC physically Task Manager doesn't show anything alarming
    but the PC is unusable.

    All these cards seem to fit in the smallest of the PCIe slots which is described as PCIe 3.0 x 1. I also have 2 PCIe x 3.0 x 16 slots (x16 and x
    4 modes).

    SATA3 is 6Gbps. PCIe Gen3 x1 is 8Gbps. PCIe is not the problem, something
    else is.

    I can't find a SATA card that would use 4 or 16 lanes, even this card:

    Look at Host Bus Adapters if you want to connect a lot of SATA drives,
    they're proper server grade. Typical consumer SATA cards aren't the same quality. LSI a commnon chip vendor, and there are ex server cards from
    Dell, HP and IBM.

    But something is very wrong if things are that slow - perhaps the problem is not the SATA card?

    Theo

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  • From Jeff Gaines@21:1/5 to Chris Green on Fri Jan 3 22:12:43 2025
    XPost: uk.d-i-y

    On 03/01/2025 in message <us0m4l-vqug.ln1@q957.zbmc.eu> Chris Green wrote:

    Theo <theom+news@chiark.greenend.org.uk> wrote:

    But something is very wrong if things are that slow - perhaps the problem >>is
    not the SATA card?

    Yes, definitely, something is very much awry.

    Defective drive :-(

    Explorer spent 5 hours this afternoon copying from source to dest and has
    in fact copied nothing but it didn't raise any errors which seems odd.

    Drive is < 2years old, was in my NAS, when I took it out I removed
    zillions of partitions and set it up as one GPT partition but something
    went wrong somewhere.

    I've turned the PC off for now as it has has shuffled some drive letters
    so I'll take a fresh look tomorrow.

    Are "Host Bus Adapters" SATA or NIC cards? I think I would rather have a
    card that doesn't sit there like a sausage if it comes across a defective drive!

    Thanks :-)

    --
    Jeff Gaines Dorset UK
    The only thing necessary for evil to prevail is for good people to do or
    say nothing. (Edmund Burke)

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  • From Chris Green@21:1/5 to Theo on Fri Jan 3 21:19:58 2025
    XPost: uk.d-i-y

    Theo <theom+news@chiark.greenend.org.uk> wrote:

    But something is very wrong if things are that slow - perhaps the problem is not the SATA card?

    Yes, definitely, something is very much awry.

    --
    Chris Green
    ·

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  • From Theo@21:1/5 to Jeff Gaines on Fri Jan 3 23:03:07 2025
    XPost: uk.d-i-y

    In uk.d-i-y Jeff Gaines <jgnewsid@outlook.com> wrote:
    Are "Host Bus Adapters" SATA or NIC cards? I think I would rather have a
    card that doesn't sit there like a sausage if it comes across a defective drive!

    They're SATA (and often SAS too). I'd expect better error reporting, but
    note that the enterprise answer to 'drive failed' is 'throw it out of the
    RAID and prompt the operator to plug in another' (or migrate to a hot spare
    if you have one) rather than try to work with a failing drive. So they may
    be more trigger happy when a drive does start to fail.

    (I assume most of them come with Windows drivers; I've only ever used them
    on Linux)

    Theo

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  • From Jeff Gaines@21:1/5 to Theo on Sat Jan 4 00:19:29 2025
    XPost: uk.d-i-y

    On 03/01/2025 in message <BSw*QSH3z@news.chiark.greenend.org.uk> Theo wrote:

    In uk.d-i-y Jeff Gaines <jgnewsid@outlook.com> wrote:
    Are "Host Bus Adapters" SATA or NIC cards? I think I would rather have a >>card that doesn't sit there like a sausage if it comes across a defective >>drive!

    They're SATA (and often SAS too). I'd expect better error reporting, but >note that the enterprise answer to 'drive failed' is 'throw it out of the >RAID and prompt the operator to plug in another' (or migrate to a hot spare >if you have one) rather than try to work with a failing drive. So they may >be more trigger happy when a drive does start to fail.

    (I assume most of them come with Windows drivers; I've only ever used them
    on Linux)

    Theo

    I have just realised that there is an LSI SAS 9207-8i in my Dell Poweredge
    T320 which is a bit older but might do the job. The Dell is going to the
    tip, it's too big and heavy for what I wanted but I will scavenge it
    first. I remember I blew a new BIOS on the card which means it works as
    JBOD and doesn't need a battery. Job for tomorrow!

    The Dell ran Win 10 and it recognised the card.

    --
    Jeff Gaines Dorset UK
    Indecision is the key to flexibility

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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  • From The Natural Philosopher@21:1/5 to Theo on Sat Jan 4 02:13:51 2025
    XPost: uk.d-i-y

    On 03/01/2025 19:17, Theo wrote:
    But something is very wrong if things are that slow
    +1

    Ice o9nly ever used SATA equipped SSDs to replace spinning rust in my
    machines and all have shown way faster access times

    --
    “when things get difficult you just have to lie”

    ― Jean Claud Jüncker

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  • From John Rumm@21:1/5 to Jeff Gaines on Sat Jan 4 11:08:50 2025
    XPost: uk.d-i-y

    On 03/01/2025 22:12, Jeff Gaines wrote:
    On 03/01/2025 in message <us0m4l-vqug.ln1@q957.zbmc.eu> Chris Green wrote:

    Theo <theom+news@chiark.greenend.org.uk> wrote:

    But something is very wrong if things are that slow - perhaps the
    problem is
    not the SATA card?

    Yes, definitely, something is very much awry.

    Defective drive :-(

    Explorer spent 5 hours this afternoon copying from source to dest and
    has in fact copied nothing but it didn't raise any errors which seems odd.

    I had a drive fail like that in my NAS once - it basically clobbered the performance of the NAS to the point where it could not function or
    respond to most requests - even to the point it could not really
    identify the problem drive.

    In the end I had to pull all the drives out, and mount them on a PC so I
    could run RAID recovery software on them.

    Drive is < 2years old, was in my NAS, when I took it out I removed
    zillions of partitions and set it up as one GPT partition but something
    went wrong somewhere.

    I've turned the PC off for now as it has has shuffled some drive letters
    so I'll take a fresh look tomorrow.

    Are "Host Bus Adapters" SATA or NIC cards?

    SATA (or SCSI!)

    I think I would rather have a
    card that doesn't sit there like a sausage if it comes across a
    defective drive!

    There may not be much smarts in the host adaptor - it comes down to the
    OS and how it tries to deal with a apparently working - but ridiculously
    slow to respond drive. (i.e. the smarts in the drive are working
    overtime to "hide" errors from the host by re-seeking / re-reading over
    and over to try and access the data)

    --
    Cheers,

    John.

    /=================================================================\
    | Internode Ltd - http://www.internode.co.uk | |-----------------------------------------------------------------|
    | John Rumm - john(at)internode(dot)co(dot)uk | \=================================================================/

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  • From Theo@21:1/5 to Jeff Gaines on Sat Jan 4 16:38:37 2025
    XPost: uk.d-i-y

    In uk.d-i-y Jeff Gaines <jgnewsid@outlook.com> wrote:
    On 03/01/2025 in message <BSw*QSH3z@news.chiark.greenend.org.uk> Theo wrote:

    In uk.d-i-y Jeff Gaines <jgnewsid@outlook.com> wrote:
    Are "Host Bus Adapters" SATA or NIC cards? I think I would rather have a >>card that doesn't sit there like a sausage if it comes across a defective >>drive!

    They're SATA (and often SAS too). I'd expect better error reporting, but >note that the enterprise answer to 'drive failed' is 'throw it out of the >RAID and prompt the operator to plug in another' (or migrate to a hot spare >if you have one) rather than try to work with a failing drive. So they may >be more trigger happy when a drive does start to fail.

    (I assume most of them come with Windows drivers; I've only ever used them >on Linux)

    Theo

    I have had to order a couple of cables, should arrive tomorrow.

    Looking on YouTube there are several set up videos and they all warn of
    the heat produced by these card, did you do anything special in terms of cooling?

    Not really. Most server chassis have a bit of airflow which should be sufficient. With the HP P410 in my Gen7 Microserver the chip and heatsink
    are rammed right in an airless corner so I replaced the solid PCIe bracket
    with one with holes to allow more airflow from the outside.

    Theo

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  • From Jeff Gaines@21:1/5 to Theo on Sat Jan 4 16:17:13 2025
    XPost: uk.d-i-y

    On 03/01/2025 in message <BSw*QSH3z@news.chiark.greenend.org.uk> Theo wrote:

    In uk.d-i-y Jeff Gaines <jgnewsid@outlook.com> wrote:
    Are "Host Bus Adapters" SATA or NIC cards? I think I would rather have a >>card that doesn't sit there like a sausage if it comes across a defective >>drive!

    They're SATA (and often SAS too). I'd expect better error reporting, but >note that the enterprise answer to 'drive failed' is 'throw it out of the >RAID and prompt the operator to plug in another' (or migrate to a hot spare >if you have one) rather than try to work with a failing drive. So they may >be more trigger happy when a drive does start to fail.

    (I assume most of them come with Windows drivers; I've only ever used them
    on Linux)

    Theo

    I have had to order a couple of cables, should arrive tomorrow.

    Looking on YouTube there are several set up videos and they all warn of
    the heat produced by these card, did you do anything special in terms of cooling?

    --
    Jeff Gaines Dorset UK
    Did you know on the Canary Islands there is not one canary?
    And on the Virgin Islands same thing, not one canary.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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  • From SH@21:1/5 to Jeff Gaines on Sun Jan 5 09:36:29 2025
    XPost: uk.d-i-y

    On 04/01/2025 16:17, Jeff Gaines wrote:
    On 03/01/2025 in message <BSw*QSH3z@news.chiark.greenend.org.uk> Theo
    wrote:

    In uk.d-i-y Jeff Gaines <jgnewsid@outlook.com> wrote:
    Are "Host Bus Adapters" SATA or NIC cards? I think I would rather have a >>> card that doesn't sit there like a sausage if it comes across a
    defective
    drive!

    They're SATA (and often SAS too).  I'd expect better error reporting, but >> note that the enterprise answer to 'drive failed' is 'throw it out of the
    RAID and prompt the operator to plug in another' (or migrate to a hot
    spare
    if you have one) rather than try to work with a failing drive.  So
    they may
    be more trigger happy when a drive does start to fail.

    (I assume most of them come with Windows drivers; I've only ever used
    them
    on Linux)

    Theo

    I have had to order a couple of cables, should arrive tomorrow.

    Looking on YouTube there are several set up videos and they all warn of
    the heat produced by these card, did you do anything special in terms of cooling?



    if you have physical space, nothing to stop you putting a small fan onto
    the card's main chip? they are usually identifiable by the passive heat
    sink on them.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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  • From Jeff Gaines@21:1/5 to Theo on Sun Jan 5 12:56:26 2025
    XPost: uk.d-i-y

    On 04/01/2025 in message <zSw*dKL3z@news.chiark.greenend.org.uk> Theo wrote:

    I have had to order a couple of cables, should arrive tomorrow.

    Looking on YouTube there are several set up videos and they all warn of
    the heat produced by these card, did you do anything special in terms of >>cooling?

    Not really. Most server chassis have a bit of airflow which should be >sufficient. With the HP P410 in my Gen7 Microserver the chip and heatsink >are rammed right in an airless corner so I replaced the solid PCIe bracket >with one with holes to allow more airflow from the outside.

    Cables arrived, boots with 4 x SSD but slooow, won't boot with 4 x SSD + 4
    x Spinners.

    Think I'll get an Asmedia 1166 card and keep it simple.

    As a side issue the order of drives in Win 10 Disk Management and
    MiniTools Partition Wizard is different and neither lines up with what I thought I had set up. It helps trouble shooting if I know what drive is connected to what slot.

    Is there a definitive way of knowing this?

    --
    Jeff Gaines Dorset UK
    Most people have heard of Karl Marx the philosopher but few know of his
    sister Onya the Olympic runner.
    Her name is still mentioned at the start of every race.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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  • From Paul@21:1/5 to Jeff Gaines on Sun Jan 5 07:58:02 2025
    XPost: uk.d-i-y

    On Fri, 1/3/2025 1:34 PM, Jeff Gaines wrote:

    I added a couple of SSDs to my server today connected to a PCIe SATA card and it has slowed the PC to a crawl, so slow it times out trying to connect by RDP!

    Sitting at the PC physically Task Manager doesn't show anything alarming but the PC is unusable.

    All these cards seem to fit in the smallest of the PCIe slots which is described as PCIe 3.0 x 1. I also have 2 PCIe x 3.0 x 16 slots (x16 and x 4 modes).

    I can't find a SATA card that would use 4 or 16 lanes, even this card:

    https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B09FY9FBTN

    which has 4 x host controllers still only needs 1 lane.

    What do I need to look for to get a reasonable speed out of my SSD drives, is it lanes or host controllers or chipset or something else?

    Advice appreciated, I can't remember when I had a PC running so slowly - it's in the middle of a job at the moment, I'll check what make the card is if it ever finishes...


    RAID cards, you might run them in JBOD mode to use the thing
    as a conventional SATA PHY.

    These kinds of adapters are normally 300 to 500. A low price
    like this is suspicious, unless these are going out of production.
    There is no question that SATA is dying, even though hard drives
    are not going away (HAMR 32TB, PMR 22TB).

    https://www.amazon.co.uk/Highpoint-RocketRAID-840C-16-Port-Controller-Black/dp/B09MPTSGM7

    PCIE x8 Rev3 (1GB/sec per lane)
    16 SATA ports

    Customer comments mention a driver signing issue. 64-bit drivers must be signed.
    Win10 32-bit will be the last 32-bit way of getting the job done.

    RAID cards with hardware support, have an XOR block as part of
    the RAID thing. This normally results in a heatsink on top.
    A "soft-RAID" card relies on an OS piece of code, to do the XOR,
    the driver sparing or rebuild or whatever. Maybe some OS RAM
    is used as a buffer for RAID file fetches (real RAID cards
    have a DRAM DIMM for a cache module).

    If the card has hardware support for RAID, this reduces CPU
    overhead, and allows a compute box to do computing and disk I/O
    in the same box. Adapters, even lowly ones, use DMA for transferring
    file reads into OS RAM buffers, and this is what normally keeps
    the overhead low. Your erroneous result indicates something is
    not right, either an interrupt storm, or a driver level issue.
    For example, maybe somebody has been shipping a WinXP driver
    with their hardware since yonks, and now it decides to act up
    on Windows 11 :-)

    *******

    You can measure interrupts in Windows, easily, but the
    graph scale calibration is a mystery meat. The graphics card
    test used to interrupt at 2000 interrupts/sec.
    There is a difference between DX11 and DX12 on the interrupt
    rate you expect. DX12 would be lower than DX11. I have not
    tested or calibrated graphics across the ages -- I could have
    done that, using my WinXP...Win10 machine but that machine
    is dead now and my analysis range is now "crimped".

    I'll just toss this out and you can play with it. A graphics
    card used to be 2000 per second. The interrupt limiter (per card)
    was around 10000 to 15000 per second or so. In this demo,
    the NVidia SmokeParticle.exe in the Visual Studio SDK they provide,
    was used to generate a load so I could "step" the interrupt rate
    on demand. Yes, you have to compile from source, to get the EXE.
    There are other ways, but interrupt characteristic unknown
    (Furmark or a 3DMark run). In any case, when the system is idle,
    there might be a few USB interrupts when your mouse whizzes around.

    [Picture] Using perfmon.msc to measure Interrupt rate

    https://i.postimg.cc/qvckX7GK/Windows-Measuring-Interrupts.gif

    Paul

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  • From Paul@21:1/5 to Jeff Gaines on Sun Jan 5 08:53:39 2025
    XPost: uk.d-i-y

    On Sat, 1/4/2025 11:17 AM, Jeff Gaines wrote:
    On 03/01/2025 in message <BSw*QSH3z@news.chiark.greenend.org.uk> Theo wrote:

    In uk.d-i-y Jeff Gaines <jgnewsid@outlook.com> wrote:
    Are "Host Bus Adapters" SATA or NIC cards? I think I would rather have a >>> card that doesn't sit there like a sausage if it comes across a defective >>> drive!

    They're SATA (and often SAS too).  I'd expect better error reporting, but >> note that the enterprise answer to 'drive failed' is 'throw it out of the
    RAID and prompt the operator to plug in another' (or migrate to a hot spare >> if you have one) rather than try to work with a failing drive.  So they may >> be more trigger happy when a drive does start to fail.

    (I assume most of them come with Windows drivers; I've only ever used them >> on Linux)

    Theo

    I have had to order a couple of cables, should arrive tomorrow.

    Looking on YouTube there are several set up videos and they all warn of the heat produced by these card, did you do anything special in terms of cooling?


    Haven't you ever had to make a cooling bracket for a PC ???

    [Picture]

    https://i.postimg.cc/k5GTdqyH/make-cooling-bracket-for-PC.jpg

    That's 1" Al angle (it's the thicker one at the store, don't use
    the thin stuff) as the stock used.

    You cut the material and place the screw hole,
    so the end of the piece fits snugly against the PC case (that's what
    stops it from drooping, is the snug fit to the case plus one screw
    inserted). This particular adapter is for another PC case (Antec Sonata)
    and does not fit the case I used for the photo properly.

    While you can make brackets that use two screw holes (and
    the end does not have to fit snug against the case wall),
    that's more work.

    The hole I drilled is beveled, to suit the screw on the Sonata.
    The screw on the Phantecs fits, but not the beveled part.

    You fit a fan and use small cable ties, to hold the fan body
    snug against the 1" surface of the angle piece. The fan needs
    a three position plug for the wiring and such (some fans
    are purchased without the plug on the end, and you have to
    fit one yourself).

    Fans come in low, medium, high, ultra, and for this application
    you would be using a low or medium. The fan draws 12V @ 0.21 amps
    so that one is close to a "medium" 80mm square fan. Could be 35CFM
    or less. An ultra is 110CFM and you wear ear protectors
    while sitting next to it :-) An ultra is 12V @ 1.00 amps.

    I started making these, when fanless video cards were invented.
    I bought two fanless cards. One ran fine without a fan. The other
    one got too hot and used to crash the system in a game. Once
    the cooling bracket was fitted and pointed at the
    video card passive heatsink, there were no more crashes during
    games. Naturally, these cheap cards without a fan, they're
    not really gamer material, but you have to pretend sometimes.

    Paul

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  • From Theo@21:1/5 to Jeff Gaines on Sun Jan 5 13:35:31 2025
    XPost: uk.d-i-y

    In uk.d-i-y Jeff Gaines <jgnewsid@outlook.com> wrote:
    On 04/01/2025 in message <zSw*dKL3z@news.chiark.greenend.org.uk> Theo wrote:

    I have had to order a couple of cables, should arrive tomorrow.

    Looking on YouTube there are several set up videos and they all warn of >>the heat produced by these card, did you do anything special in terms of >>cooling?

    Not really. Most server chassis have a bit of airflow which should be >sufficient. With the HP P410 in my Gen7 Microserver the chip and heatsink >are rammed right in an airless corner so I replaced the solid PCIe bracket >with one with holes to allow more airflow from the outside.

    Cables arrived, boots with 4 x SSD but slooow, won't boot with 4 x SSD + 4
    x Spinners.

    Boot time with a RAID card can be slower as it needs to run the RAID BIOS
    and identify the drives. It shouldn't make the machine slower to use - if
    it does something is wrong with the drives. You may be able to disable
    running the RAID BIOS if you aren't booting off the RAID drives (either in
    the RAID BIOS settings or in regular BIOS settings).

    I would generally suggest using the array for storage and not as a boot
    drive - use an NVMe SSD for that.

    Think I'll get an Asmedia 1166 card and keep it simple.

    Asmedia are generally sane as far as consumer grade stuff goes, better than JMicron in my book.

    As a side issue the order of drives in Win 10 Disk Management and
    MiniTools Partition Wizard is different and neither lines up with what I thought I had set up. It helps trouble shooting if I know what drive is connected to what slot.

    Is there a definitive way of knowing this?

    No idea. Does the HBA manufacturer have any addon tools? Or somewhere in Properties maybe?

    Theo

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  • From Jeff Gaines@21:1/5 to Paul on Sun Jan 5 17:39:30 2025
    XPost: uk.d-i-y

    On 05/01/2025 in message <vle2t2$12a04$1@dont-email.me> Paul wrote:

    On Sat, 1/4/2025 11:17 AM, Jeff Gaines wrote:
    On 03/01/2025 in message <BSw*QSH3z@news.chiark.greenend.org.uk> Theo >>wrote:

    In uk.d-i-y Jeff Gaines <jgnewsid@outlook.com> wrote:
    Are "Host Bus Adapters" SATA or NIC cards? I think I would rather have a >>>>card that doesn't sit there like a sausage if it comes across a >>>>defective
    drive!

    They're SATA (and often SAS too).  I'd expect better error reporting, >>>but
    note that the enterprise answer to 'drive failed' is 'throw it out of the >>>RAID and prompt the operator to plug in another' (or migrate to a hot >>>spare
    if you have one) rather than try to work with a failing drive.  So they >>>may
    be more trigger happy when a drive does start to fail.

    (I assume most of them come with Windows drivers; I've only ever used >>>them
    on Linux)

    Theo

    I have had to order a couple of cables, should arrive tomorrow.

    Looking on YouTube there are several set up videos and they all warn of
    the heat produced by these card, did you do anything special in terms of >>cooling?


    Haven't you ever had to make a cooling bracket for a PC ???

    No!

    I don't do anything to push a PC very hard, 95% of the time I'm in Visual Studio, the rest Office.

    --
    Jeff Gaines Dorset UK
    Roses are #FF0000, violets are #0000FF
    if you can read this, you're a nerd 10.

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  • From jon@21:1/5 to Jeff Gaines on Sun Jan 5 18:57:12 2025
    XPost: uk.d-i-y

    On Fri, 03 Jan 2025 18:34:07 +0000, Jeff Gaines wrote:

    I added a couple of SSDs to my server today connected to a PCIe SATA
    card and it has slowed the PC to a crawl, so slow it times out trying to connect by RDP!

    Sitting at the PC physically Task Manager doesn't show anything alarming
    but the PC is unusable.

    All these cards seem to fit in the smallest of the PCIe slots which is described as PCIe 3.0 x 1. I also have 2 PCIe x 3.0 x 16 slots (x16 and
    x 4 modes).

    I can't find a SATA card that would use 4 or 16 lanes, even this card:

    https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B09FY9FBTN

    which has 4 x host controllers still only needs 1 lane.

    What do I need to look for to get a reasonable speed out of my SSD
    drives,
    is it lanes or host controllers or chipset or something else?

    Advice appreciated, I can't remember when I had a PC running so slowly -
    it's in the middle of a job at the moment, I'll check what make the card
    is if it ever finishes...

    How old is this computer.?

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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  • From Jeff Gaines@21:1/5 to jon on Sun Jan 5 19:43:21 2025
    XPost: uk.d-i-y

    On 05/01/2025 in message <vlekm8$15m7v$1@dont-email.me> jon wrote:

    What do I need to look for to get a reasonable speed out of my SSD
    drives,
    is it lanes or host controllers or chipset or something else?

    Advice appreciated, I can't remember when I had a PC running so slowly - >>it's in the middle of a job at the moment, I'll check what make the card
    is if it ever finishes...

    How old is this computer.?

    It is based on the Asus Z170K board so around 8 years?

    --
    Jeff Gaines Dorset UK
    Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it whether it exists
    or not, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedies.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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  • From wasbit@21:1/5 to Paul on Mon Jan 6 09:57:44 2025
    XPost: uk.d-i-y

    On 05/01/2025 13:53, Paul wrote:
    On Sat, 1/4/2025 11:17 AM, Jeff Gaines wrote:
    On 03/01/2025 in message <BSw*QSH3z@news.chiark.greenend.org.uk> Theo wrote: >>
    In uk.d-i-y Jeff Gaines <jgnewsid@outlook.com> wrote:
    Are "Host Bus Adapters" SATA or NIC cards? I think I would rather have a >>>> card that doesn't sit there like a sausage if it comes across a defective >>>> drive!

    They're SATA (and often SAS too).  I'd expect better error reporting, but >>> note that the enterprise answer to 'drive failed' is 'throw it out of the >>> RAID and prompt the operator to plug in another' (or migrate to a hot spare >>> if you have one) rather than try to work with a failing drive.  So they may
    be more trigger happy when a drive does start to fail.

    (I assume most of them come with Windows drivers; I've only ever used them >>> on Linux)

    Theo

    I have had to order a couple of cables, should arrive tomorrow.

    Looking on YouTube there are several set up videos and they all warn of the heat produced by these card, did you do anything special in terms of cooling?


    Haven't you ever had to make a cooling bracket for a PC ???

    [Picture]

    https://i.postimg.cc/k5GTdqyH/make-cooling-bracket-for-PC.jpg

    That's 1" Al angle (it's the thicker one at the store, don't use
    the thin stuff) as the stock used.

    You cut the material and place the screw hole,
    so the end of the piece fits snugly against the PC case (that's what
    stops it from drooping, is the snug fit to the case plus one screw
    inserted). This particular adapter is for another PC case (Antec Sonata)
    and does not fit the case I used for the photo properly.

    While you can make brackets that use two screw holes (and
    the end does not have to fit snug against the case wall),
    that's more work.

    The hole I drilled is beveled, to suit the screw on the Sonata.
    The screw on the Phantecs fits, but not the beveled part.

    You fit a fan and use small cable ties, to hold the fan body
    snug against the 1" surface of the angle piece. The fan needs
    a three position plug for the wiring and such (some fans
    are purchased without the plug on the end, and you have to
    fit one yourself).

    Snip <


    Nope, never had the need or the thought to do that.
    Most people don't have the tools to do that. DIY, PC wise, is going
    generally out of fashion. They prefer a bought solution.

    --
    Regards
    wasbit

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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  • From Theo@21:1/5 to wasbit on Mon Jan 6 11:01:15 2025
    XPost: uk.d-i-y

    In uk.d-i-y wasbit <wasbit@nowhere.com> wrote:
    Nope, never had the need or the thought to do that.
    Most people don't have the tools to do that. DIY, PC wise, is going
    generally out of fashion. They prefer a bought solution.

    It is not hard to find bought solutions, so I'm not sure why Paul is
    advocating metal bashing:

    https://www.amazon.co.uk/Bewinner-Cooling-System-Blower-Computer-default/dp/B07N6B5FTS

    Most PC cases come with vented PCIe slot covers nowadays, so just keeping
    one of those in place gives you ventilation in the slot area. They are also available aftermarket should you need extra:

    https://www.amazon.co.uk/Sourcingmap-Covers-Vented-Blanking-Computer-Black/dp/B00VG67MQ2

    Theo

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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  • From The Natural Philosopher@21:1/5 to wasbit on Mon Jan 6 10:16:46 2025
    XPost: uk.d-i-y

    On 06/01/2025 09:57, wasbit wrote:

    You fit a fan and use small cable ties, to hold the fan body
    snug against the 1" surface of the angle piece. The fan needs
    a three position plug for the wiring and such (some fans
    are purchased without the plug on the end, and you have to
    fit one yourself).

    Snip <


    Nope, never had the need or the thought to do that.
    Most people don't have the tools to do that. DIY, PC wise, is going
    generally out of fashion. They prefer a bought solution.

    Ultimately how much is your time worth?
    I enjoy fixing some things. especially treasured items that can no
    longer be obtained.
    But a perfectly good 8 year old PC can be got for £75...



    --
    In a Time of Universal Deceit, Telling the Truth Is a Revolutionary Act.

    - George Orwell

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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