[Solved] MSI Eclipse sli onboard RAID questions

I just bought 2 more WD Caviar Black 640gb to put into RAID 0 being that they were on sale. I don't want to buy a RAID controller, so I will use my Mobo's onboard RAID. I was reading the instruction manual for my MSI Eclipse sli MB (which made me feel a little less of a man...) and it seems there are three different options for RAID:

Intel ICH10R

JMicron 362

Drive Booster Manager

Any tips on which of these would give me the best performance/reliability config?

Right now my set up will be 2 WD Caviar Black 640gb in RAID 0, and another WD Caviar Black 640gb for a boot drive. Would you consider this the optimum config for what I have?

Thanks guys.

Hi,

I have the exact same motherboard (MSI Eclipse SLI), disk drives (2 WD 640GB Caviar Black), and configuration (RAID 0) that you're interested in. It's fast. AVADirect (system integrators) set it up for me.

You said that you have three choices for setting up RAID, but you really only have two hardware-related choices: whether to connect your drives to SATA ports 1-6 (controlled by Intel ICH10R) or ports 7-10 (controlled by JMicron 362). Both chips offer RAID 0. What you thought was a third choice (Drive Booster Manager) is a user interface for configuring drives connected to ports 7-10.

My only two drives are connected to ports 9 and 10, which is unconventional. It violates the official MSI manual's suggestion to use the ICH10R ports first. But it's working just fine, great in fact. I don't notice any delays while batch-editing dozens of large Photoshop images at a time, or performing simple disk operations by the hundreds or thousands (moving, copying, renaming, creating thumbnails). A huge improvement over an older HP Pavilion.

I'm trying to remember why I chose to populate the JMicron-controlled ports first. I was imagining how best to use up to ten internal drives, and I was thinking up to four drives on a RAID 0 (if one fails, they all fail, but you get speed), and up to six drives on a RAID 5 or 6 for weekly backups (slower, but can survive one or two simultaneous disk failures).