Asus sabertooth z77

[afool]

I have the above motherboard. I also have a M4 SSD drive that I want to use for the operating system. I have as well, 4 Seagate sata HD's <1.5 gb each> which I would like in a RAID 10. Along with that 2 optical drives, SATA of course. My question: What ports do I use to accomplish this the correct way? I have read the manual, read many posts on here, and just get more confused between the Intel ports, Asmedia ports that I need to ask for help here. Whats the best way to accomplish what I would like to do/use? If I even can. Any help would be appreciated, and thanks for the time if anyone responds. Can I install the SSD drive, install the operating system, come back later and add the 4 HD'd in the RAID? <probably not> Just kinda wondering.

Thanks!
akb

 

[alexoiu]

Hi,
Intel® Z77 chipset :
2 x SATA 6Gb/s port(s), brown
4 x SATA 3Gb/s port(s), black
Support Raid 0, 1, 5, 10
ASMedia® ASM1061 controller : *5
2 x SATA 6Gb/s port(s), gray
How I would do it:
Connect the SSD to one of the Intel brown SATA ports, the 4 RAID HDDs to the Intel black ports, one optical drive to the available gray SATA port and the other one to the ASMedia gray SATA port (although the specs say that ATAPI devices are not supported).
Set SATA to RAID in BIOS, restart, use Ctrl+I to configure the RAID array, leave the optical device and the SSD as non-RAID, exit and start installing Windows.
Load the RAID driver during Windows install.
Install then the ASMedia driver.

 

[afool]

Many thanks!!!

 

[afool]

Best answer selected by afool.