Sabertooth x58 SATA connections and fan connections

Dewinte

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Dec 12, 2010
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Hi there everyone any help or information would be great. My planned set up for now includes the following parts relevant to my questions,

Case: NZXT Phantom (Black)
MoBo: Asus TUF Sabertooth x58 (Intel ICH10R and Marvell 9128)
OS: Windows 7 Home Premium 64bit
CPU cooler: Noctua NH-D14
Case fans: Standard with possible second large top mounted fan and moving the second small side fan to the front of the case. If the rear fan and top fans exhaust and the single front and front side fans intake there will be an imbalance in airflow, not sure on the remedy.
SSD: Mushkin Callisto Deluxe 90GB SF-1200 based SSD (OS and frequented applications)
HDD(s): 4x 1TB Samsung Spinpoint F3 in RAID 10 for speed and redundancy (storage and pagefile etc)
Optical drive: Generic Sony DVD/RW or Samsung Blu-Ray drive depends for now
PSU: Corsair AX850 fully modular, Seasonic OEM

Hopefully that's all the background information needed, I did some searching to see if there were specific answers to my situation but didn't really find the specifics I wanted, if it's been dealt with before then my apologies.

I wanted to find out if what I'd read is correct and that the Marvell 9128 is pretty much not advisable to use at all really as the ICH10R is superior for pretty much every use. My proposed set up would take all 6 ICH10R ports and would require me to load the intel rapid storage drivers during windows 7 installation, the mobo would need to be set as RAID and I'd put the 4 F3's into the array. My understanding is since driver 9.6 the SSD outside the RAID array will now get TRIM commands while the mobo is set to RAID mode, hoping this is correct. Now with the SSD in the primary slot, followed by the 4 HDDs and the optical drive am I at any disadvantage to performance by having all the slots loaded up and will RAID 10 have any performance overheads? I know it has no parity calculations like RAID 5 does but I'd assume there's still some organisation for reads and writes for the array and then with the SSD on the same controller... I'm hoping this sounds like an appropriate set up and wouldn't be bottlenecked, I'm also wondering if by taking all 6 ports does affect the I/O panel on the front of the case? Is there anything that I'd be advised to do in regards to the proposed set up?

Now for the fan connections, one large top fan and a normal rear fan are included so are two smaller side fans. I can either get an additional large top fan and move one of the side fans to the front, get another top fan and buy a fan for the front or any other recommended solution. The connections for this are of interest as the manual on the NZXT site doesn't work for now and I'd like to take advantage of the built in fan controller it has unless that'd some how impede the effectiveness of the fans. I'd like to know how best to connect the fans whether thats using the built in controller or not and if that'd be connecting them all to the motherboard or some direct to the power supply considering the CPU cooler has 2 fans itself.

Many thanks for any help, this will answer my final question before purchasing for my build so its greatly appreciated. As I'm doing the order all in one from a UK website it'll mean I can put whatever additional fans I need into the order, oh and I'm wondering if I'll have to order some extra SATA cables as the motherboard only comes with 2x SATA2 and 2x SATA3 but no idea if the SSD, HDDs or optical drive will come with their own as well anyway. Thanks again!