Advantages to spreading drives accross SATA controllers

[Kristofor]

Hi,

I'm not sure if this is the best place to put it, so if not feel free to move it. I'm in the process of buildling a new desktop and I just got a GA-X58A-UD3R mainboard. I'm planning on putting 3 drives into the machine, an SATA2 SSD for the OS and applications, and 2 other larger drives for storage set up as RAID 1.

The mainboard itself has 2 SATA2 controllers, the southbridge and a JMicron chip. My question is whether there are any advantages to putting the SSD drive on one controller and the RAID drives on the other controller, or whether it won't make any difference. Thanks.

 

[Hawkeye22]

Intels ICH10 generally performs better than JMicron's controller. If you're running win 7, I'd recommend putting the RAID on the JMicron since I don't think the ICH10 controller can pass along the trim function to SSD's when in raid mode. Also, since the raid is just being used for storage I don't think the performance will be much of an issue.

 

[Kristofor]

I probably should have clarified. The two drives for RAID aren't SSD. Thanks for the info though, that was my suspicion but its been so long since I kept up on new hardware information that I thought I'd ask.

 

[Kristofor]

Best answer selected by Kristofor.

 

[Hawkeye22]

No need to clarify. I understood. I commented on that because you can still have the ICH10 controller in raid mode, hang all 3 drives off of it and still have the SSD running as a single drive while the other two drives are in RAID 1. In this scenario, the raid will have better performance than the JMicron, but you'll lose the trim function on the SSD.

 

[gefthebest]

I know there hasn't been much activity here for a while but I'd like to follow up on the same question:

I have 2 SATA controllers; Marvell has 2 SATA3 ports and Intel has 2 SATA3 and 4 SATA2...
When I run benchmarks I get slightly better performance when running on SATA3 then on SATA2.

Here are my 2 possible setups, would either of them be better (in any aspect):

1. OS SSD on Marvel SATA3
HD and SSD on 2 Intel SATA3 ports (Z68 Hard drive acceleration with SSD)

2. OS SSD on Intel SATA3 port
SSD 2 on Intel SATA3 port -- still doing the hard drive acceleration with SSD
HD on Intel SATA2 port
-> could disable the Marvell controller in BIOS...

Thanks for the help!