Mixing sata port types (sata/gsata)

freebagel

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I am looking to set up a WHS box with a 750gb hard drive as the boot drive, and six 2tb drives set up in a Raid-1 array.

My motherboard has 7 sata ports and is an ICH10R board, so it should be good to go. Except.....

5 of the ports are sata2 ports, and 2 of the ports are Gigabyte's proprietary gsata. I suppose this means I can't do what I want, as the six 2tb drives would be on two separate controllers?

So what are my options here? For my PCH SATA control mode I can choose between IDE, Raid(xhd), and AHCI. If I select Raid(xhd) then the gsata ports aren't even recognized.

Is there anyway around this?

Assuming not, what are my options? If I get a simple PCI SATA card with another 2 ports on it can I still set up RAID with some of the hard drives plugged into the motherboard and some plugged into the PCI card? At this point my setup would look like...

Motherboard Sata Port 1 - 750gb boot drive
Motherboard Sata Port 2 - 2tb drive in Raid-1
Motherboard Sata Port 3 - 2tb drive in Raid-1
Motherboard Sata Port 4 - 2tb drive in Raid-1
Motherboard Sata Port 5 - 2tb drive in Raid-1
SATA Expansion Card Port 1 - 2tb drive in Raid-1
SATA Expansion Card Port 2 - 2tb drive in Raid-1
Motherboard GSata Port 1 - empty
Motherboard GSata Port 2 - empty

Hence, the Raid array would be made up of motherboard SATA ports 2-5 and the two ports from the SATA expansion card. Will this work?
 

freebagel

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That's a software raid card, correct?

Assuming it would work, would that be any better than just getting a cheap $20 SATA card with another 2 points and using the motherboard's built-in ICH10R raid? Or will the ICH10R only work on the ports plugged directly into the motherboard and not on the SATA card?
 


Correct.

If you move your boot drive to one of the GSATA ports, and move one drive from your SATA card to port SATA 1, you will be able to have 5 drives in RAID-1.

If you're looking for a hardware RAID card with ROC (RAID On Chip) here's one: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816118104
 

freebagel

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That's probably overkill (pricewise). I think since I've decided I'm ok with Raid-10 instead of raid-5 that I wouldn't get enough of an advantage out of a hardware card to justify the price. I'll be limited by gigabit lan anyway since this is for a server.

Unfortunately though, it doesn't look like there's an x8 slot on the board. Here are the ports listed:

PCI Express 2.0 x16: 1
PCI Express x16: 1, running at x4
PCI Slots: 2