SSD for O/S and Raid 0 for other stuff

Best option is to use the SSD as a OS + program disk. STR is half as^% 2nd.

You may use Raid0 for HDDs, Your option. Raid0 on HDDs only improves Sequencial read /write - Only important if working with large files.

If still want to use raid:
Place SSD by itself on Intel SATA III port set bios to Raid (if not using Intel prorts for raid set Bios to AHCI). SSD will work fine with Bios set to Raid (ON INTEL Chipset), it just can not be a member drive of a raid setup.
Install windows 7, after instal complete install latest version of Intel's RST driver (ver 10.6, there is also a F6 driver if needed).
Happy with SSD win7, then power pown, connect your two HDDs and set up raid.

System Should be fat, dumb and Happy

Good comments from retiredchief^

But, let me ask what you wish to accomplish with raid-0 or raid 1?

Raid-0 has been touted as a performance enhancer.
Sequential benchmarks do look wonderful, but the real world does not seem to deliver the indicated performance benefits for most
desktop users. The reason is, that sequential benchmarks are coded for maximum overlapped I/O rates. It depends on reading a stripe of data simultaneously from each raid-0 member, and that is rarely what we do.
The OS does mostly small reads and writes, so raid-0 is of little use there.

The value of raid-1 and it's variants like raid-5 is that you can recover from a drive failure quickly. It is for servers that can not tolerate any interruption.
Modern hard drives have a advertised mean time to failure on the order of 500,000+ hours. That is something like 50 years.
With raid-1 you are protecting yourself from specifically a hard drive failure. Not from other failures such as viruses, operator error,
malware, fire, theft, etc.
For that, you need external backup. If you have external backup, you do not need raid-1

Since you have a 60gb SSD, that is the place to install the os.

You could use the Msata port, or any sata port to install a cache for your 1tb drives.
It would allow faster access to the data that tends to stay in the cache. But, it would be better yet to add that spece to the main ssd and just put that data in a partition on the ssd in the first place. If you tend to play one game for a while, then move on to another, a HDD cache might work out well.
If you think that might be the case, upp your ssd capacity to 80 or 120gb and carve out a 20gb partition to be used as a HDD cache. With a Z68, this can be somewhat dynamic if you reserve the space up front so the OS does not try to use it. If you see no benefit, then use windows storage management to delete the partition and add it back to the ssd c space.

I would just use 1 hard drive by itself in ahci mode along with your ssd. If you need more space, make it a 2tb drive or add a second drive.

Thanks for your reply guys, looks like my OS will be on the SSD.

Initially i wanted Raid 1 to sort of serve a backup HDD as I suffered a couple of HDD before with no backup as I was too lazy to.

However after reading the forum here, I reckon I'll give Raid 0 a try since modern day HDD are pretty reliable. (this change of heart from Raid 1 to Raid 0 was after bought them HDD, if i read up more before buying I doubt i would have bought two HDD.)

Basically I am a gamer (looking forward to Diablo3) who likes to multitask on my PC, like downloading stuff and playing games at the same time and also switching back and forth programs like Office etc for my work....so if Raid 0 doesnt really help here then I might either pass the extra HDD to my brother or stick to Raid 0.

Once again, thanks for clearing my doubts!

Regards
Gavin

I suggest you put the second drive in an external enclosure and use it for backups.
I have used this one attached to a usb3.0 port.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E168...

Normally 8gb is plenty. But, ram is cheap, so why not get 16gb? It is probably the best performance enhancer per dollar when doing heavy multitasking.

As gepfelt and I have indicated, Raid0 only improves Sequencial preformance.
If you do a lot of work involving large files such as encoding DVD and Blu-ray video files which are typically 1gig - 40 Gigs for a single file, work with large spreadsheets and perform recalculations on them, work with CAD/ Cam drawings or edit large number of jpeg photos on a Daily basis then a raid0 setup makes sense. Otherwise I'd skip the raid0.

If you skip raid, don't forget to set bios to AHCI instead of RAID.

PS RAID does not work for bugs - Have to spray it directly on them pesky things to kill em.