popatim :
The raid will run on only the intel ports. When you enable raid you will lose the sata3 speeds on those 2 ports and be dropped down to sata2.
Use the AsMedia to run your optical drive.
All motherbd raid is software raid, with the exception of a few really high end boards.
If you plan to raid5 three slow drives you will create an even slower array. If you want some semblance of speed, get a 4th drive and go raid10.
Lastly raid5 is for uptime should a drive fail. If you want your data safe then you need a backup system instead.
Yea but my real concern is if the drives on the sata3 port will be bottle necked by the other interface or if they will actually be down scaled to sata2 on a hardware level. If not I imagine the two drives will produce more redundancy issues since its obviously not a good idea to use two drives that are similar but with different sata interfaces so I would think using two different interfaces would also not be a good Idea but it has to at least be possible if the manual is stating that raid 5 and 10 are options being that they use more than two drives.
I would be willing to bet that it is hardware emulated raid as opposed to purely hardware/software raid. Not sure though like you said I know boards exist that actually have hardware controllers for raid and this board is high end for the Z77 chipset. I guess this might be able to put that question to an end. If in the Bios/UEFI if the setup screen is a rapid storage utility would that mean it is software raid like i said before it is most likely just a means to set up the raid configuration in the bios so the drive can be recognized before entering the OS and then have the Intel Rapid Storage driver handle everything on a software level. But then what would be the point of having the rapid storage utility in the bios if its all handled on a software level anyways?
Raid 10 might seem like a decent idea if its at least hardware emulated raid but my goal is not to keep my drives at their original speed or increase. I know I am going to take a hit with write speeds and hopefully read speeds will be close to single drive performance or a little better. I simply don't want to compound this reduction by using purely software raid like windows uses because it creates a Virtual Hard drive making things slower yet. I also would really rather not put my system ssd on a third party controller for stability and speed concerns.
I understood that raid 5 is not primarily for redundancy and setting up raid in general comes with its own point of failure beyond mechanical failure or situational events like power surges. I have other disks that just dont match that I can use to create disk images for the OS and then use file history backups for the data drives on the array. I cant be creating 1Tb images because it takes up an enormous amount of time and puts alot of wear and tear on disks and manually backing up files takes to much time and effort not to mention in certain scenarios like music files where I try to organize it I cant simply drag these files and overwrite the files that changed I would have to go through everything individually or just delete the whole backup drive which again would take time and put to much were and tear on the drive.
I am being quite difficult being that I am refusing better overall options for the storage issue specifically but I am just trying to balance the configuration of the whole system and am unwilling to make certain sacrifices in other areas. So working in the confines of this situation what would you guys recommend I do. There is just a kind of a hazy understanding of how this will work so I just need someone to elaborate on how my way of going about this is actually going to work so I can try to rethink this.