Sata III Card Slowed Down my PC

[holygamer]

I needed to add more Sata III ports to my PC so I bought a Supermicro 8-Port SAS/SATA Card which uses a Bus Type of PCI Express x8 so that's in the x8 slot. I have a cheap £40 PCI-E 2.0 Gigabyte GV-N520SL-1GI graphics card in the x16 slot. I don't do graphic intensive things like play games so that card is fine for my usage as I only bought it because I needed CUDA VP5 support. I needed that card as the video restoration work I do requires it. I have an 8 core CPU as well. I don't fully understand what the graphics card does, it's just that before I can encode the videos - the videos need an index file. The program that creates the index file requires CUDA support. I don't believe the video encoder is actually using the graphics card to encode the video.

I read in my motherboard manual that the x8 slot shared bandwidth with the x16 slot. It says when the x8 slot is populated then the x16 slot will operate at up to x8 mode. I thought that didn't sound good so I searched forums on Google and they seemed to suggest that it's no big deal and you don't lose much performance. However that doesn't seem to be true as I'm getting slowdown.

I have an 8 core CPU. I do CPU intensive video restoration that takes the CPU up to 98-100% usage. However my PC doesn't slow down and I can still watch YouTube videos for example without lag. After I installed the Sata card I got slowdown. I can still use my PC OK it's just that the slowdown/lag is annoying and I watching videos is impossible due to the lag.

Why do I get slowdown when the graphics card isn't under any strain? Also I've added several hard drives to the Sata card but none of them are being accessed when I'm encoding videos so I don't understand why I'm getting slowdown?

Also does anybody know if I'd get slowdown if I used this Syba PCI-e v2.0 card?

It's an x2 card but my motherboard doesn't have an x2 slot which is weird as it's an expensive motherboard. What motherboards have an x2 slot?

[kalniel]

What other processes are using CPU time when you see slowdown?

[DanceswithUnix]

What motherboards have an x2 slot?

None that I have ever seen, but that should plug into a x4 slot which are common enough.

How come you are plugging so many drives in locally and not into some sort of NAS?

Edit to add: Try checking the SMART stats on the attached drives. If one of them is glitching it could slug the whole machine down, so it could be as simple as a cable fault.

[holygamer]

Screenshot of CPU Usage when encoding: ttp://i384.photobucket.com/albums/oo290/holygamer/CPUUsage_zps91905785.png
I don't see anything unusual.

The card can take 8 drives but I've only got 3 drives connected. The cables are connected properly. The 3 drives aren't being used when encoding.

Would I get slowdown on my PC if I had the Syba x2 card plugged it into a 4x slot? My motherboard manual says I have 2 x16 slots. The first one is occupied by my graphics card. It says the 2nd 16x slot runs as 4x and that it shared bandwidth with all the x1 slots. But then it says all x1 slots become unavailable when a PCIe x4 card is installed which seems to contradict the previous sentence.

I dont' know what SMART is or how to check it.

I don't want a NAS. They are more expensive than just buying individual drives.

[kompukare]

Regarding PCIe bandwidth: For gaming x16 vs x8 makes very little difference. For mining even less (all those guys mining with cards on x1 ribbon cables). Some compute stuff is bandwidth sensitive. Not sure if there are any programs out there which can monitor transfers over PCIe though.

But I suspect something more mundane (but hard to track down) like a driver stalling. Try downloading Process Explorer (ex SystemInternals now Microsoft so somewhere on their site) and one of the latency tools (DPC Latency Checker, Latency Monitor):
http://www.thesycon.de/deu/latency_check.shtml
http://www.resplendence.com/latencymon

Both fairly advanced tools. The basic of latency tools should be fairly self explanatory. With Process Explorer you want to check out Interrupts (most drivers) and any spikes in Service Hosts svhost.exe.

DanceswithUnix's SMART idea is worth looking at too. Download http://gsmartcontrol.sourceforge.net....php/Downloads - the Windows build is listed towards the end of that page. And see if there are any SMART errors).

[Splash]

Does Resource Monitor show anything? You can launch this by opening Task Manager and going to the Performance tab and clicking Resource Monitor. I find it incredibly useful when trying to nail the cause of slowdowns.

EDIT: also - if you disconnect the drives from the new card do you still see the slowdowns?

[holygamer]

When encoding a video Latency Checker says: This machine should be able to handle real-time streaming of audio and/or video data without drop-outs. Absolute Max is: 382 us. Latency Monitor says the same. Is there something specific I'm supposed to look for in those programs?

Don't know what I'm supposed to be looking for in Resource Monitor.

I haven't disconnected the drives yet but I shall try that later.

With Process Explorer you want to check out Interrupts (most drivers) and any spikes in Service Hosts svhost.exe.

What would an interupt look like? What do you mean by spikes? If you're referring to the K values increasing/decreasing a lot, they seem to remain the same.

I opened GSmart Control and four drives are unsupported. They are brand new Samsung Seagate ST4000DM000 4TB drives which are working fine. The other drives when double-clicked on say "Passed" under Overall Health Self-Assessment Test.

[Splash]

Any settings in the card BIOS that look odd? Does SMART report them using the correct model name (ie the same as if you were to plug them into an onboard port) or something else? (and if so what)

In resource monitor you're basically looking for high usage: be that memory, network, disk or CPU. If it's disk then sort it first by read, then by write and see what the process (image) and file is that's causing it.

[holygamer]

I can't see any problems. Bios looks fine.

It seems when I encode videos to a hard drive attached to the card then I get the most lag. If I encode to a video attached to the motherboard then I only get a little lag, only really noticeable in YouTube videos.

Could someone clarify this for me: Would I get slowdown on my PC if I had the Syba x2 card plugged into a 4x slot? My motherboard manual says I have 3 PCI Express x16 slots. The first one is occupied by my graphics card. The 2nd one (nothing will be plugged into this) runs at 8x and shared bandwidth with the x16 slot running at x16. The 3rd PCI Express x16 slot runs at 4x and it shares bandwidth with all the x1 slots. But then it says all x1 slots become unavailable when a PCIe x4 card is installed which seems to contradict the previous sentence.

So if I've got nothing plugged into the x1 slots should I be able to get Sata III speeds from the Syba card without it causing slowdown on my PC?

[DanceswithUnix]

Given that you shouldn't get a slowdown with what you have, I don't think anyone can guarantee that the Syba card will be any better