Quad Core" 2.66 2009/Nehalem (4.1)

Question

Does the Extra SATA port (under the optical drive) offers the same speed as the 4 drive bays for the an SSD drive (System only).
PS: 2009 MP upgrade to 6 Core Xeon W3680 32GB GTX680 5.1EFI
Thanks

Answer 1

RE: PCIe lanes and speeds
All PCIe cards have the first "finger" with 11 lands on each side that provides power and basic control.
x1 cards, like the ones you pictured, have only a small additional "finger" with seven additional pins on each side and stops at pin 18. This provides support for ONE serial data bit -- thus the designation as x1. In PCIe 2.0, this provides 500 MBytes/sec (per lane, but one lane).
A typical single rotating Hard drive can source one busrt of data off the platters (once the data are directly under the Raed/Write head) at no more that about 125MBytes/sec, so x1 is not exactly slow.
The fastest SSD drives available today are running about 800MBytes/sec bursts, so an x1 card WOULD be a bottleneck for those.
x4 cards have a larger second "finger" with 14 additional pins on each side, and stop at pin 32. This provides support for three additional serial data lines for a total of FOUR, thus the designation x4. In PCIe 2.0, this means 4*500 for each of four lanes, so 2,000MBytes/sec.
x8 adds four more data lines in a still larger connector for a total of 8, and speeds up to 8*500 or 4,000MBytes/sec
x16, like you graphics card, add an additional 8 data lines to that for a total of 16 data lines, and speed up to 16*500 or 8,000MBytes/sec.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCIe_2.0#2.0
ThunderBolt-1 provides two independent channels of 10,000Mbits/sec (1250MBytes/sec) each
ThunderBolt-2 provides up to 20,000Mbits/sec (2500MBytes/sec total).
With optical cables, ThunderBolt can be extended to hundreds of feet.