RAID 1 in 2 HD with a SSD boot disk

You have far less risk with Raid 1 over raid 0, so go with what gives best performance (hardware based). There is no management needed unless a drive fails. Both software and hardware will show you if a drive is compromised.

Thanks for the info.

I tried setting up RAID with the MoBo (intel's utility ) - and when launching windows it seems to bluescreen and then restart the machine. Any idea why this might be?

Hardware seems to recognize the two drives, but Win 7 doesn't and keeps crashing

As long as your boot drive is not on the intel raid SATA controller. Usually there are two SATA controllers if there is raid. Make sure the non raid drive is bootable.

after that, check your drivers in device manager. Make sure nothing is outstanding. At that point, do a search on the 0x??????7e error or which error you get.

It is interesting....
Raid 1 is definitely better as you stated......
as long as the data is read its going to be twice as fast as the writing time.
Data is written to the harddrive and stripped to the connected raid drive. so writing will be a little slower.!

@Selas: What is the error that you get. and anyupdates over it?

Hmm. At the bios (of mobo ASUS P7P67LE) I can only designate either all drives as RAID or none even if I do the RAID setup afterward with Inte's raid SATA controller program. The non-raid drive is still bootable. The bluescreen flashes for a very brief second before the machine restarts so I can't pickup the 0x... error.

In going through other threads, it seems like the solution is to setup RAID and reinstall - even if the SSD is not set up in RAID...

(The only other alternative is to change the SATA ports, but I have no indication that ASUS has designated particular ports to certain tasks).

Thoughts?