RAID on Asus Crosshair Formula V

[Cmorciv]

Im terribly confused, i cant seem to find anything online about this but i feel like im really just looking in the wrong places...
This is the first time ive ever attempted putting harddrives in RAID
This is what im trying to do with my asus crosshair formula v:
I have a SSD, two samsung 500gb (one of them has a factory image, ive never seen that before?) hard drives, a WD 1Tb hard drive, and a disk drive... I want the SSD for operating system and some programs, i want the two 500gb HDDS in RAID 1 for documents, music, etc.... The WD 1Tb for games... and the disk drive as a disk drive (what else would it be?)... How to do i go about doing this? when i allow the sata ports for RAID in bios it changes ports 1-4 for raid, and that makes me terribly nervous lol... and then from there i have no idea what to do... if someone could explain the process to achieve my goal, or point me in the right direction, that would be greatly appreciated,
thanks in advance...

 

[alexoiu]

Are there needed data on drives, or they are clean?

 

[Solandri]

Page 4-39 through 4-42 of the English manual for your motherboard has step by step instructions on setting up RAID with your motherboard. You may want to being with 4-38 if you're unfamiliar with some of the terminology.

http://www.asus.com/us/Motherboards/CROSSHAIR_V_FORMULA/HelpDesk_Manual/

If your BIOS settings have the SATA ports set as AHCI (which it should be since you have a SSD), then there are no problems switching it to RAID. RAID is just AHCI with a BIOS bootstrap to allow you to configure a RAID array.

If it's currently set to SATA, then switching it to RAID will make Windows unbootable. You'll have to run a repair or reinstall to fix it. But you should do this anyway because switching it to AHCI will cause the same problem. And you really want the computer in AHCI mode with a SSD. It enables NCQ, which will give the SSD a 5-10x speedup at reading small files.

when i allow the sata ports for RAID in bios it changes ports 1-4 for raid, and that makes me terribly nervous lol

That just means that ports 1-4 are now RAID-capable. As per the manual on page 4-40, when you boot your computer after enabling RAID, hold down ctrl+f. That will bring up the RAID configuration utility. That's where you tell the motherboard which drives will be in your RAID array.

 

[Cmorciv]

SSD only has OS on it, 500gb drives has stuff on it that doesnt matter to me, and 1Tb drive has a folder of everything ready to be moved to an external drive... so within the next half hour i wont have anything i need on any of the drives lol