RAID advice

[pseguin]

I'm a performance junkie, so I have a core i7 extreme with an Asus Rampage III Black Edition Motherboard. The only shortcoming is that it only has 2 SATA3 connectors and the rest are SATA2. I have 2x 2GB SATA3 hard drive that I want to run in RAID0 and also 2x 256GB SATA3 SSD's that I also want to run in RAID0. Apparently, a limitation of the X58 chipset is that you can't run raid on both controllers. So, what I did was connect my 2 hard drives to the SATAIII connectors and set up a software RAID0 in WIndows 7 and connected the 2 SSD's to the SATAII connectors and set up a hardware raid. Realizing I'm not getting the best performance from the SATAIII SSD's, I bought (what I thought was correct) an SAS-SATA RAID PCI controller advertised as 6GBs. Well, upon opening it the manual states that only SATAII is supported. I set up a RAID0 anyways and also set up a RAID0 on my motherboard. The RAID0 from the motherboard won't be recognized by Windows 7 no matter what I do so I had to revert to software RAID.

Bottom line is that I want to have a RAID0 for my hard drives so that I have a 4GB striped volume and a RAID0 for my 2 SSD's with a 512GB striped volume all using SATAIII. What's my best solution and is this possible at all? Am I better off putting the SSD's on the motherboard SATAIII connectors and make a RAID0 and then just connect the SATAIII hard drives to the SATAII connectors and make a software RAID0?

I thought a 3rd party card would be the solution but it seems I bought the wrong thing. Another consideration is whether or not I lose Windows 7 TRIM su0port by using a 3rd party controller card.

 

[hang-the-9]

You won't see any speed difference between SATA 2 and 3, don't go nuts trying to get it all working on 3.

 

[pseguin]

Best answer selected by pseguin.