Asus p8z68-v onboard raid

[sallen726]

Hello, I have an asus p8z68-v generation 3. My current setup contains:

1 corsair 120GB SSD (OS)
1 500GB WD HDD (OS storage, VM's, etc)
3 3TB Seagate Barracuda HDD (Media Library)

I originally created a Win8 Storage space with parity for the media library but the write speeds were abysmal. I am going to try to do a motherboard Raid 5 on the 3 3TB drives...I know its not real raid, but I'm just going to test the speed for write as opposed to storage spaces. I went into BIOS and switched the SATA config to Raid and then setup a raid 5 array on the 3 3TB drives.

a) do I need to setup raid 0 on both the SSD and the 500GB HDD or can I leave them as unraided volumes?
b) I attempted to leave them as unraided volumes but when I booted up the PC the OS fails to load and gives me the really nice win8 "sky blue screen of death" with a winky face saying windows rain into problems, attempting to restart.

I don't know if the OS failing to load is due to not setting up the ssd and 500 gb hdd as raid 0 or if its just a setting in the OS I need to change to boot and see the raid 5 array I created. Any help would be appreciated.

 

[cin19]

First the answer is a) you don't have to raid the ssd and the 500gb HDD, just left them as un-raid volumes. b)Somehow for win8, you need go back to the BIOS to change back to ahci mode, then you and boot up the PC, I don't have time to find out yet. If you use win7 you can boot either under the ahci or raid mode. I think you need go to edit the registry.

If you can boot up the PC and don't see the raid5, then you need initialize the disk before disk manager can access it.