Comment on Am I corrupting my data?
Nollij@sopuli.xyz 1 day agoKind of. They will be multiples of 4. Let’s say you got a gigantic 8i8e card, albeit unlikely. That would (probably) have 2 internal and 2 external SAS connectors. Your standard breakout cables will split each one into 4 SATA cables (up to 16 SATA ports if you used all 4 SAS ports and breakout cables), each running at full (SAS) speed.
But what if you were running an enterprise file server with a hundred drives, as many of these once were? You can’t cram dozens of these cards into a server, there aren’t enough PCIe slots/lanes. Well, there are SAS expansion cards, which basically act as a splitter. They will share those 4 lanes, potentially creating a bottleneck. But this is where SAS and SATA speeds differ- these are SAS lanes, which are (probably) double what SATA can do. So with expanders, you could attach 8 SATA drives to every 4 SAS lanes and still run at full speed. And if you need capacity more than speed, expanders allow you to split those 4 lanes to 24 drives. These are typically built into the drive backplane/DAS.
thelemonalex@lemmy.world 11 hours ago
I see, okay, I understand now. Thank you very much for explaining that in detail!