3 SATA Controllers?

Question

I have a GA-X58A-UD3R motherboard and it has 3 SATA controllers:

• ICH10R (SATA2)
• JMicron (GSATA2)
• Marvel 9128 (GSATA2)

The latter two support 6 Gbps devices but I only have 3 Gbps devices. I have a DVD drive, SSD system drive, and two 2 TB data HDDs. I want to RAID1 the two HDDs.

Does anyone have any recommendations as to how I should set this up? I'm not sure if I should put them all on one controller or split them up. Do the RAIDed drives need to be on their own controller? How do I choose one over the other?

Over my head!

Answer 1

I would just plug the drives into whatever, and use software RAID to create the array. Especially with those cheap and potentially difficult to replace chips. There shouldn't be any performance considerations with a setup that simple.

Answer 2

The RAID pair should be able to coexist with the SSD on a single controller. To avoid possible configuration mistakes such as accidentally including your SSD in the array, I would keep the SSD on one controller, and the two 2TB drives on a separate set of controllers.

Theoretically, you would want the DVD drive on the third controller as to not saturate the SATA Bus, but you're not likely to have a problem with your setup.

Another suggestion if you have the time, is to try the RAID array on each controller, and benchmark the read/write speeds each time. Pick the fastest controller out of the bunch.

Answer 3

Preferably only use the Intel controller. It has the best performance, which matters for the SSD. And you still get TRIM to the SSD even though the controller is in RAID mode as long as the SSD itself isn't part of a RAID array. This allows you to disable the other two controllers in BIOS and so have a little boot time of your POST.