Yes, I was planning on using the Marvell ports for my Bluray and DVD burners. Strangely, my Bluray burner does not work on my current Marvell 1.5Gbps port when my DVD burner does, even though both can be seen fine in the BIOS. Many others have reported this as a driver bug, but it has never been resolved. Hopefully I won't have this problem on a newer Marvell controller.
I won't be overclocking (already I push the CPU to 80%+ for hours at a time with a good air cooler in an Antec P190). The Z77 has Thunderbolt, and if I stay with my current 3yr refresh cycle, I might find it useful for faster backups.
Currently 2x256GB is cheaper than 1x512GB with 840 Pros, and I really want to get to the half a TB range to edit smaller projects directly off the SSDs and then export the finished project back to hard drives. Maybe two striped would get a small performance boost too, I don't know. It sounds like trim has been resolved on newer chipsets with RAID though? Never really been a big problem with my X25-Ms honestly.
I've read the WD Blacks don't do well in an external hardware RAID setup because they have pretty aggressive timeouts and can easily drop a drive in a RAID array? I may eventually get one or two Sans Digital TR5UT+B enclosures because single 3TB drives aren't large enough to hold a complete backup of everything, and I hate having a different hard drive for every other year. What happens is the older stuff sits on a shelf and never gets accessed so you never know how solid the backup is. Maybe rotating two RAID 5 arrays and keeping one offsite would be better? That isn't cheap though, hence why I was pondering a TR5UT+B, but they are pretty specific on using RAID enterprise drives like Seagate Constellation ES and Western Digital RE-3. Not cheap. Some have reported using Reds in them just fine. Thunderbolt enclosures are too expensive for me right now, and there aren't a lot of choices in the market yet either.
At any rate, looks I'll be sticking with my four Barracuda 7200.12 internally for awhile, since they won't work in a Sans Digital TR5UT+B and nothing else will be appreciably faster. They are about 3/4 full (with some temp files I can delete), and I expect one of the drives will fail at some point in the near future being 3yrs old. Hard to make good storage decisions...