Is this possible with my motherboard?

[dctravis]

Hello, i currently have the z77 asrock fatality professional mothrrboard which has 6 6Gb/sec ports and 4 3Gb/sec ports. The 6Gb ports are divided into three controllers. The intel controller currently has 120gb intel 520 ssd in the m_0 port and my bluray drive (LG) in the m_1 port. Then there are two marvell controllers (m_0-m_1 and m_2-m_3). All four of these ports are connected to seagate barracuda 7200 drivez with 3TB capacity each. My question is whether or not it is possible to raid the four drives into a single 12TB partition? I tried raid 0 with the marvell remote explorer gui but it would only do drives one and two together and three and four together. I then tried windows disk management but it will allow me to put all four drives into a striped volume but the total capacity only shows as the capacity of a single drive... If nothing else i can simply do 2x6TB but i really was hoping for one large partition. Any help is appreciated.

Also i do realize thag this would offer no redundancy whatsoever and the speed increases would probably be negligible. But i have 21TB of external hdds and planned to simply use my 6 2TB drives as a backup of my internal drives. Primarily for bluray backups which is why i want one partition for better organization and simple folder structure.

As a side question, if i wished to expand my ssd storage for game installtion, would the best option simply be to add a secondary partition and install games to that? Ive heard that raid for ssds are very unreliable and also cause the life expectancy of the drives to go down horribly. It would still have very fast read/write times when plugged into the second intel 6Gb port ( would move the bluray drive to a 3Gb port).

 

[cirdecus]

For some reason, the board has 3 controllers, which unfortunately sucks if you want large RAID volumes. Each controllers RAID utility will only be able to control the drives on that particular controller.

The only way to bundle them is through a software RAID, done either in windows or with a third party RAID software. The downside to this, is that your data may not be accessible once you reformat and rebuild the software RAID. I generally try staying away from software RAIDS at all costs.

That being said, what drive is your OS on, the SSD? You'll want to make sure that your 3TB drives do not have an operating system on them, since an operating system cannot reside on a GPT disk. The RAID volume that you create with the software needs to be converted or created as a GPT volume to support those large sizes.

I know wasting all of those SATA connections sucks, but the way ASRock implemented them with different controllers is stupid. I suggest buying a PCI-E SATA3 controller card with the number of ports you need (4 I believe). This will allow you to have a secure and solid hardware RAID.

Be mindful of slot speed. A PCIx1 card will hit a ceiling of throughput. However, four 3TB traditional drives probably will be just fine with a PCIx1 card.

Here's a good one:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816115077

Only 90 bucks. There's another 4 port option thats around 60, but I wouldn't bother with, it's pretty poor compared to this one.

 

[dctravis]

Ok thanks. They are already gpt. Windows 7 64 bit ultimate is on the ssd.
I guess ill just do 2x6TB and when i reenlist next year ill probably build another desktop with some of the bonus and make sure the controllers will support what i want.

 

[Dereck47]

My question is whether or not it is possible to raid the four drives into a single 12TB partition?

Yes. Connect your 4 Barracudas to ports SATA2_2 thru SATA2_5 (see page 15 of your motherboard manual for the location of the ports).
Hard drives cannot spin fast enough to saturate a SATA 3Gb/s port, let alone a 6Gb/s port so you will suffer no loss of performance connecting the drives there.

Ive heard that raid for ssds are very unreliable and also cause the life expectancy of the drives to go down horribly.

Not true. The odds of drive failure increase with RAID because you have more than 1 drive in your system, but there’s nothing inherent about RAID that causes the life expectancy of drives to go down or makes the drives more unreliable.

If you wish to expand your SSD storage for game installation you can just purchase another 120GB Intel 520 and connect it to your 2nd Intel 6Gb/s port. You don’t have to set up a RAID array.

 

[dctravis]

Ok, I knew that they would not hit the bandwith limit, but when talking to seagate tech support on the phone (3/4 drives were DOA) they asked me if they were plugged into the sata 3Gb/sec or 6Gb/sec ports and stated that if the drives (since they are 6Gb/sec drives) were plugged into the slower sata ports the drives may not communicate correctly and would need some type of adapter... This didn't sound like it was true, but I figure I might as well ask just to be certain as to whether the tech support guy knew what he was talking about...

 

[dctravis]

Also when going to the marvell remote gui it has the option to make a virtual disk raid array... is this basically the same thing windows disk management would do or would this actually be considered hardware raid?

Sorry about all the questions, I just don't want to have to change it after I transfer all of my files over.

 

[Dereck47]

Yes, virtual disk RAID is basically the same thing as Windows Disk Management and is considered Software RAID.

Firmware RAID is via motherboard BIOS.
Hardware RAID is a controller card that plugs into a PCIe slot on the motherboard.

 

[dctravis]

The only way to bundle them is through a software RAID, done either in windows or with a third party RAID software. The downside to this, is that your data may not be accessible once you reformat and rebuild the software RAID.

I'm just curious as to what you mean by the second sentence of that statement? Does that just mean that if I alter the software raid in any way then the data would be gone? or are there things that I may have to do that could cause data loss?