Motherboard Question

[goombawaho]

I was thinking about one of these motherboards: Asus P8Z77-V-PRO. I was going to do an SSD boot drive and a RAID 1 for my data. So, I need one 6GB/s sata port for the SSD and two 3GB/s ports for the SATA storage/RAID. In the manual, it says the following in the RAID section (poor English included): "Due to chipset limitation, when set any of sata ports to RAID mode, all sata ports run at RAID mode together."

Does this mean that I can't plug in an optical drive into one of the 2 remaining sata ports because 2 of them are used for RAID? Seems like it would be dumb to lose 2 out of 4 sata ports because 2 of them have been dedicated for RAID.

 

[rclarke250]

No, remember, each Sata port, is in affect a single channel controller. The intel management rom will allow you to add a drive from the connected ports to the raid, So, an optical drive can be connected to one of the 3 GB ports okay. Also, the extra 6 GB ports are connected to a Marvell chip, and not the Intel chipset. So they are independent, but are for some reason, only for data drives. You could put the raid there, and the SSD on the Intel 6 GB, and the optical on the 3 GB ports. I have my SSD on the Marvell chip on my Asrock board, runs great. I have the older P67 chipset, so no integrated 6 Gb ports from Intel.

 

[goombawaho]

Okay, that sounds like a plan then. Thanks.

 

[goombawaho]

Actually, looking at the specs again it says the following, so I don't think you can put the RAID on the ASMedia sata ports:

2 x SATA 6 Gbps (PCH), Support for RAID 0, 1, 5, 10
2 x SATA 6 Gbps (ASMedia)
4 x SATA 3 Gbps (PCH), Support for RAID 0, 1, 5, 10

from this review

http://www.anandtech.com/show/5793/...ith-ivy-bridge-asrock-asus-gigabyte-and-msi/4

 

[rclarke250]

The Marvell sata supports raid 0,1 per manual page 4-22 under raid configurations, E7198_P8Z77-V-PRO.pdf Manual. Which for some reason is the 10th manual under manuals for this model motherboard.

 

[goombawaho]

Well, um, I had downloaded the manual for the P8H77-V by accident. Note the H77. I'm thinking of going with that one instead since I don't need the WIFI and overclocking. Sorry. Probably don't need to re-evaluate the same question with this different but close model.