Asus P8P67 Deluxe RAID 1

[TVisitor]

Hi all,

I'm putting together my new system. I have 2 Western Digital Caviar Black drives (SATA III), 1 Corsair M4 256G solid state drive, and a SATA III based Blu-Ray burner.

The mobo has 2 SATA III connectors from the Intel chipset, 2 SATA III connectors from the Marvell chipset, and 4 SATA II connectors from the Intel Chipset.

I want to put the 2 Hard drives in a RAID 1 configuration.

However I noticed this tidbit in the manual:

"Due to Chipset limitation, when set any of the SATA ports to RAID mode, all SATA ports run at RAID mode together"

Is this implying that all 8 ports on the mobo suddenly become part of the RAID array, even if I only want to use RAID 1? And therefore to plug in my Blu-Ray burner & SSD [not in the RAID array obviously] I will need another outboard controller?

I can't imagine that's correct, but that's what it sounds like I just read.

 

[Diogenes2]

The wording is just a poor translation..

It just means you can't set the ports individually to IDE, RAID or AHCI ..

You have to actually configure 2 or more drives in an array..
Individual ports may have stand-alone drives..

 

[TVisitor]

Thanks Diogenes. I've done a lot of builds before but am totally new to RAID, so there's a whole new set of mysteries for me to explore.

What do you think would be the ideal way to configure this?

I would think that since all the devices support SATA III, I could use the 4 SATA III ports; but I've read in various places that Marvell controllers aren't "all that." As well, will hard drives or optical drives *really* make use of a potential 6GBp/s bandwidth?

 

[TakeNoPrisoners]

Thanks Diogenes. I've done a lot of builds before but am totally new to RAID, so there's a whole new set of mysteries for me to explore.

What do you think would be the ideal way to configure this?

I would think that since all the devices support SATA III, I could use the 4 SATA III ports; but I've read in various places that Marvell controllers aren't "all that." As well, will hard drives or optical drives *really* make use of a potential 6GBp/s bandwidth?

Only SSDs can use all of that bandwidth, and the transfer conditons need to be perfect. Optical drives won't come close, they are very very slow. Mechanical HDDs can only max out a SATA 1.5Gbps connection.