LGA 2011, SATA 3, no marvell ?

gougoul

Honorable
Dec 31, 2013
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10,510
Hi all,

I curently have an Asus Sabertooth x58 with an i7 970 & 24Gb of ram.
I'd love to upgrade the computer, and i'm shopping for an LGA 2011 board that could handle 2* raid (maybe 1 raid 0 ssd & 1 raid 1 HDD).
Since I had and still have bad experience with the marvell SATA controller (randomly but more often than not it gets stuck for ages during boot), so I'd love to find one that does without it, unless there is one you can recommend blindly...
lastly, is SSD via onboard raid 0 worth it speed wise ?
 
Solution
Unfortunately the X79 chipset has only two SATA-III ports in addition to four SATA-II ports. The SATA-III ports are suitable for an SSD raid, and hard disks have a very hard time saturating a SATA-II link which makes a SATA-III HDD interface superfluous. This leaves two SATA-II ports for whatever else you have in addition to any add-in storage controllers that the manufacturer has tacked on.

I have 3 RAIDs on my machine, two on the Intel PCH and one in an external enclosure connected via eSATA.

The Rampage IV Extreme that I have has an additional two SATA-III ports exposed through an AsMedia 1061 SATA-III controller. This controller is AHCI compatible but unlike the chipset it does not support a firmware RAID solution. A RAID can be run on these ports, but only through the operating system and not the firmware. The consequence is that it can be difficult to boot from any devices attached to these ports, so they should be for additional storage only.

The brand new Rampage IV Black Edition has two AsMedia 1061 add-in controllers for a total of four additional SATA-III ports.
 

gougoul

Honorable
Dec 31, 2013
24
0
10,510


Thanks for the details...

But can you setup like the Intel Sata 3 as RAID 0, and setup the Sata 2 as RAID 1 for HDD and add a DVD burner on it ?
 


You most certainly can.

You can cross a RAID across the ports too I think but that shouldn't be necessary.

If your SSDs are identical, throw them both on the chipset SATA-III ports. Put your primary HDDs on the chipset SATA-II ports. Optical disks must go on the chipset ports, the AsMedia 1061 is for HDDs only and will goof up if optical drives are used (probably ATAPI related). I'm not sure if this is true with the Marvell/LSI chips found in some other X79 motherboards as I only have experience with the RIVE.
 
Solution