Quote Originally Posted by SkOrPn View Post
I'm not sure about the power management thing, but I can say this for sure good quality PCIe RAID cards should use all available lanes that they were made for so in theory you should have 500 MB/s on each PCIe 2.0 lane, so if you get a x4 raid card would result in 2000MB/s throughput, and x8 4000MB/s theoretical throughput.
I don't think you'll find ANY PCIe cards that are NOT videocards able to use PCIE 2.0 bandwidth. This was specifically introduced for video. Given the glacially slow rate of uptake of PCIe by hardware controller manufacturers changing from PCI, and the probability that they are going into boards that can only support PCIe 1.0 anyway (and the chip issue mentioned below), I bet there's little chance of a PCIE 2.0 controller card soon.

Halve those numbers and you might be closer. And even then the throughput is limited by the IOPs chip on the card for wider bandwidth slots, not the slot width, so IIRC PCIe 1.0 x4 is about the best bandwidth you'll get whatever card you have and even if it's designed for/plugged into x8.