SSD w/ AHCI and 2 mechanical HDD's in Raid 0 on same controller

[jake8078]

Hi all, newbie here!

Just as the thread title says, I'm trying to figure out how to enable my crucial m4 in AHCI mode, as well as setting up a raid zero with my two 600 GB WD 7200 RPM drives. This has been driving me nuts - I've been searching for hours and can't find anyone that's solved this.

I have a Gigabyte EP45-UD3P - it has 6 SATA ports using an intel controller as well as the 2 purple SATA ports on the gigabyte controller. I've read in multiple places that the gigabyte controller is slower than the intel, so I would like to have the following setup:

Port 0: Crucial M4 SSD (boot drive)
Port 1: DVD Burner
Port 2: WD HDD (in Raid 0)
Port 3: WD HDD (in Raid 0)

However, if I go into the BIOS, I can select only ACHI OR RAID. Because I've read that having an AHCI enabled on an SSD is highly recommended for performance, I would like to be able to have that advantage as well as the speed advantage of having the other 2 drives in Raid 0 on the intel controller.

What am I missing on how to do this? Thanks in advance!!!

 

[geofelt]

Not to worry.

AHCI is a subset of raid, so specify raid as the sata mode.

With the latest intel drivers, a SSD will get passed the trim command to help with performance, so long as it is not part of a raid array.
Your two hard drives can be set up as raid-0.

That said, do you really have a app that will benefit from raid-0?
In most cases, the performance improvement that you see with synthetic sequential benchmarks do not show up in actual app performance.

 

[jake8078]

Thank you, Geofelt.

I set it up as RAID and benchmarked the SSD. I'm actually getting slightly better performance than with the AHCI-only driver that was otherwise being used (forget what it was called), so all is indeed well. I also verified that TRIM is enabled.

I use raid zero because I've always been told it's faster. Of less importance, I also like the simplicity of having only one "drive". I backup everything that's important anyways, so the potential reliability issues aren't really a concern to me.

Thanks again!

 

[jake8078]

Best answer selected by jake8078.