Looking at PCIe cards for MP 4,1 and 5,1. I want a fast SATA card with at least one eSATA and one internal port. CMP 2010 has PCIe 2.0 with "mechanical support for 16 lane cards." There are three open slots. one PCIe 2.0 X 16 and two PCIe 2.0 X 4. I assume one of the PCIe 2.0 X 16 slots is the GPU card, simply because that's a throughput intensive function and vaguely guess that 16 means about 4 times the throughput of 4. Can anyone explain in simple terms (or point me to a resource for non-engineers) what a lane actually is, what impact (and how) the number of lanes has on performance? Specifically, I'm interested in exactly what specs are relevant to disk access and performance. I have seen card specs for multiple chips and channels which can be assigned to up to 8 ports. How do I relate chip count and channel count of card to PCIe slot? Again I assume, by common sense, that the X 16 slot would take better advantage of faster cards. OTOH, "common sense" often lets one down and I'd hate to waste either card or system resources. I need help in understanding what the maximum SATA card specs that my system can benefit from are and in identifying the correct slot for same.
From Specs:
PCI Express expansion
From Specs:
PCI Express expansion
- Three open full-length PCI Express expansion slots5
- One PCI Express 2.0 x16 slot
- Two PCI Express 2.0 x4 slots
- All slots provide mechanical support for 16-lane cards
- 300W combined maximum for all PCI Express slots