Rampage IV Extreme RAID Setup Help

[DeChe]

Hey Guys n Gals,

The setup i'm trying to build currently is:

Rampage IV Extreme
WD 300GB 3.5" SATA-III 6Gb/s VELOCIRAPTOR Hard Drive - 10,000RPM x2
WD 2TB 3.5" SATA-III 6GB/s Caviar Green Hard Drive
Corsair 120GB Force 3 SSD

Now all these drives are SATA 3 (6GB) compatible and the MB internal controllers are as such:
Intel® X79 chipset :
2 x SATA 6Gb/s port(s), red
4 x SATA 3Gb/s port(s), black
Support Raid 0, 1, 5, 10
ASMedia® PCIe SATA controller :
2 x SATA 6Gb/s port(s), red

So my dilemma is I would like to use the 4 SATA 3 (6GB) available to me but I would want to RAID 0 the 2 Raptor Drives. As far as I can tell so far only the Intel X79 Chipset controller supports RAID, but I want to install the OS onto the SSD. I've been told it's best to have the OS on the Intel controllers to boot from. Can anyone enlighten me on this.
Basically it looks like I need to use the 2 Intel SATA 3 (6GB) connections for Raptor and the ASMedia SATA 3 (6GB) connections for the other 2 drives but I'm not sure if this will allow the OS to boot properly.

Many thanks in advance for responses,

DeChe.

 

[acowsik]

In all honesty you will not be able to utilize the full potential of the 6GB/s ports with regular hard drives.. I have the same board as you and my spec is below..

Intel Core i7 3930k @ 3.8Ghz
ASUS Rampage IV Extreme
Samsung 256GB 840 Pro SSD x 2 in RAID 0
1TB WD Velociraptor 10K RPM HDD
eVGA GTX 560

I connected the 2 SSDs to the Intel 6GB/s ports and used the 3GB/s port for my HDD.

In your case, here is what I would suggest that you do..

In the BIOS, under SATA configuration set the mode to RAID.. this enables you to setup a RAID array with any drives that are configured in a RAID array and any non-RAID drives will run in AHCI mode..

Connect your SSD to one of the Intel 6GB/s ports and connect your hard drives to 3 of the 4 Intel 3GB/s ports. Set the ASMedia controller to IDE mode and connect only the optical drive to one of the 6GB/s ports under that controller. The optical drive will not boot/read media in AHCI/RAID mode.