3.5" mounting kit with USB 3.0

You have an internal drive cage for SATA, there are no internal cages like that for USB You can get an external drive with USB3 connection, take out the electronics, mount these at the end of your hard-drive in a regular mounting kit that just uses side brackets and run a cable to your USB ports from there.
 
i did finally opt for

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817998184&nm_mc=KNC-GoogleAdwords&cm_mmc=KNC-GoogleAdwords-_-pla-_-NA-_-NA&AID=10446076&PID=4176827&SID=7mhcgyxl9r61

and for the 3.5" bay:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817994099

it had been my intent to raid the 2 sata ssd's on different raid channels. but even on a single raid channel, it should be enough to offset the slower write performance of SSD.

LOL.. i wonder what performance would be like if i used the icy dock raid striped on 2 128gb SSD's, then used the main board raid to raid those 2 SSD's with another 256gb SSD? 3 drives in 2 raids as a single striped device as an OS disk... i think that might be a bit of overkill.