Best Configuration with the hardware I have

[euthanized]

I have an ASUS P9X79 Pro and am wondering what the best configuration would be based on what I have. I currently have a 250GB SSD which I am going to connect to one of the intel 6gb/s ports for the OS. Then I have 2 additional Seagate barracuda drives (3TB storage with SATA 6Gb/s NCQ Interface).

Obviously I am going to install the SSD on one of the intel 6gb/s ports, but what about the other two. I was thinking of leaving them stand-alone and placing one on the other 6gb port, and one on the 3gb/s port, but perhaps it would be better to place them both on the 3gb ports and go with a RAID-0? It just seems like a waste putting the 6gb drive on a 3gb channel, but I haven't much choice...

there are also 2 6gb/s Marvel ports, but I was wanting to use this later for the SSD caching option that ASUS offers on it's new mobo's.

Thoughts? What would you guys do in this instance?

 

[Dereck47]

Connect your HDDs to the Intel 3Gb/s ports. Hard drives can be 6Gb/s compatible, but not 6Gb/s capable.
No hard drive can spin fast enough to saturate a 3Gb/s port, let alone a 6Gb/s port.

SATA 2 (3Gb/s) speeds are from 151MB/s to 300MB/s.
The 3TB Seagate Barracuda has Read/Write speeds of 156MB/s.
http://www.seagate.com/files/staticfiles/docs/pdf/datasheet/disc/barracuda-desktop-hdd-ds-1770-1-1212us.pdf

 

[euthanized]

Connect your HDDs to the Intel 3Gb/s ports. Hard drives can be 6Gb/s compatible, but not 6Gb/s capable.
No hard drive can spin fast enough to saturate a 3Gb/s port, let alone a 6Gb/s port.

So how much would I benefit from striping the 2 3TB drives on the 3Gb/s ports? Or even if I mirrored them, would I lose that much over just leaving them stand-alone?

 

[Dereck47]

Probably be best to leave them as separate drives. If you stripe them and one of them dies then you will lose all of your data.
Best to use one as a dedicated backup drive.