Setting Up Multiple Hard Drives on ASRock Board

[jbrown88]

Hi guys, got a question for you. I've been reading about the SATA3_A0 and SATA3_A1 ports and how they are slower than the regular SATA3_0 and SATA3_1 ports. I'm wondering how I should set my hard drives up.

I planned on running my OS on my Samsung 840 Pro SSD, and I have 2 1TB Western Digital Black drives. I want to run RAID1 on the 2 1TB drives. Shoud I put the OS SSD on SATA3_0 and put the RAID drives on the A0 and A1 ports? Or, what configuration should I use for this?

Any help for this would be much appreciated. Thanks!

 

[Dereck47]

The slower Read/Write performance your are referring to only applies to SATA 3 (6Gb/s) SSDs.
Hard drives can have a 6Gb/s interface but they cannot spin at 6Gb/s speeds. So you can connect HDDs to SATA 3Gb/s ports or SATA 6Gb/s ports and they will benchmark the same.

The 1TB WD Black has sustained Read/Write speeds of 126MB/s, which is actually SATA 1 (1.5Gb/s) speeds.
http://www.wdc.com/wdproducts/library/SpecSheet/ENG/2879-771434.pdf

 

[jbrown88]

The slower Read/Write performance your are referring to only applies to SATA 3 (6Gb/s) SSDs.
Hard drives can have a 6Gb/s interface but they cannot spin at 6Gb/s speeds. So you can connect HDDs to SATA 3Gb/s ports or SATA 6Gb/s ports and they will benchmark the same.

The 1TB WD Black has sustained Read/Write speeds of 126MB/s, which is actually SATA 1 (1.5Gb/s) speeds.
http://www.wdc.com/wdproducts/library/SpecSheet/ENG/2879-771434.pdf

So would I be best off placing the SATA 3 SSD (the Samsung 840 Pro) on the SATA3_0, and place the 2 WD 1TB on the SATA3_A0 and A1 ports, since their transfer rate is slower anyway? I just want to be able to achieve maximum speed and performance out of each drive.

Also, I guess I can ask this while I'm here. I've never set up a RAID before. Is it best to set it up through the motherboard? Or is software a better way of doing it?

 

[Dereck47]

I personally would keep all of the drives on the Intel ports. So the SSD would be on SATA3_0, and the 2 HDDs would be on the Intel 3Gb/s ports.

Setting up your RAID through the motherboard is best. Don't connect your HDDs or set up your RAID array until after you've installed your O/S on your SSD.

If you don't connect anything to the ASMedia 6Gb/s ports, disable the controller in BIOS, which will speed up POST time.