Did i buy the right board for 2 SATA3 SSDs in RAID0?

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d3n1s_47

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Mar 13, 2012
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Hello all

I bought a gigabyte GA-Z68XP-UD5 and i would like to know if i will benefit fully of my 2 corsair force GTs in RAID0 if i plug them on the SATA3 ports which as far as i know are controlled by the Z68 itself and not some BS marvell controller. Anyone running this setup?
 
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you're right it's not really BS but the one i have on my P6X58D premium is primitive at best. With one SSD (either of my 2) on the SATA3 ports i get 420mb/s read and about 250mb/s write and the GTs are capable of MUCH more. I just want to make sure i get my money's worth, should be close to 1gb/s. Anyone actually tried it?
 
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Yes, that motherboard will support 2 Corsair Force GT SSD's in RAID 0. I would suggest that you plug them into the first two ports (SATA3_0, SATA3_1) because those are the only SATA III ports on the board. All of the rest are SATA II. You can use the SATA II ports (SATA2_2 - SATA2_5) for additional harddrives since 3 Gb/s is plenty of bandwidth for a mechanical harddrive.
 
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Alright so with that out of the way, i need a reliable board that will keep a 4ghz overclock running for as long as possible. I will only ever use one GPU (have a 5850 for now but will upgrade that soon), have 8gb of gskill 1866mhz ram, a 2700k, a corsair HX750 PSU and an adaptec 3405 raid car with 2 drives in raid1 on it for data protection. My main reason to upgrade was the SSD raid0 but looking at this board's features it looks rather fantastic!

Any other thoughts?
 
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I'm not really into overclocking so I can't comment on that. However, I would suggest that you just use the onboard SATA III & SATA II connectors to setup both of your RAID arrays. The only reason you need an add-in RAID card these days is if your (most likely older) motherboard does not support RAID.

Anyone else want to comment!
 
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i have no choice to use it as the board does not have enough sata ports for all my devices if i dont use it. I just prefer the separate RAID controller for my data cuz it has it's own CPU and memory and what not, maybe it's just me!

Thanks for your feeback though! Anyone else?
 
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Clearly, the Marvell 88SE9128 is for the birds, it is B.S. as you say, it's limited to a total of 500MB/s with its' shared PCIe x1 (single) lane. In addtion, often the Marvell ports are data-only ports aka non-boot drives; read your manual to verify.

On the Marvell note, only the Marvell 918X (9182 for RAID) offer sufficient bandwidth for the current SSD drives i.e. >400MB/s. In contrast the 9182 (no typo) offers shared x2 PCIe lanes or ~950MB/s.

Only use the Intel SATA3 ports, they offer full bandwidth of SATA3, or ~1,100MB/s+.

To answer the OP's question, yes the Z68 Intel SATA3 ports are more than sufficient for RAID 0. Keep in mind, in RAID 0 if (1) SSD fails then all the data on RAID 0 is permanently gone i.e. toast; 1/2 data = 0 data.
 
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Yep, that's why i have acronis installed which does a differential backup of my OS drive every week and stores it on my RAID1 + on another seperate storage drive. Also i have a scheduled task that copies everything on the RAID1 volume and stores it on the single drive as well. It might be overkill but i have too much stuff i dont want to lose, pictures, music, videos, java projects, etc...
 
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Like ... what?

The onboard Intel SATA3 or RAID 0 is fine, you don't need a Dedicated RAID Card and I think I established the Marvell is a very poor choice. Get a Dedicated RAID Card if you want or need 4~6 SSD's in RAID 0 array and then with a battery backup for the RAID Card.

You might want to look into a RAM Cache to the SSD if you want obscene speeds.
 
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Well guys i had a bit of an issue trying to install windows on the raid volume. Windows would always tell me that it could not install on that volume when selecting the drive to install to, no matter what driver i fed it from the gigabyte CD. I tried anyway and at the first reboot i was getting 2 boot choices (both windows 7) and neither was working, missing winload.exe or whatever it was.

Anyone?
 
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SATA III(6Gb/s) are colored in the MB(gigabyte GA-Z68XP-UD5) as White, there are two of them and usually with an intel controller(Z68 chipset) Put them there and set the SATA in RAID0 on the BIOS and you're good to go.
 
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That's what i did, getting weird issue (see above post). They are on the white ports. Running them as standalones for now 🙁
 
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