Okay, having reviewed the manual, the way I think it works is:
Intel's ICH7R provides 4 SATA ports/channels. Three of these are implemented as standard SATA connectors, while the fourth channel instead has the SiL RAID controller on it. The SiL RAID controller is used to implement what ASUS is terming "Ez-RAID", and it splits its channel from the ICH7R into two physical SATA connectors. This means that two devices can be connected, but the OS will see them as a single SATA device occupying a single channel thanks to the SiL controller that's sitting there, which means that you can install onto a RAID volume without any special driver disk (hence, "Ez-RAID"). While I like this concept (though I have concerns about bottlenecking issues, with two drives having their traffic routed through what boils down to a single SATA channel...and I'm not sure how these ports can be claimed to be "SATA 3.0 Gbps", given that each one splits a single SATA 3.0 Gbps interface), it's damn near fatal to my proposed build. Lastly, that one out of place SATA connector is provided by the Jmicron controller, which also provides the single e-SATA port, and which is capable if implementing a RAID-0 or 1 array across the e-SATA port and the internal port. Also, because the SiL controller is hanging off the ICH7R, the former can be used to implement a 4 disk RAID by spanning to a single disk on the SiL controller. No word if it can span to two disks on the SiL controller, but it's implied that it cannot.
So...what this would seem to mean is that a 4-disk RAID-5 plus a two disk RAID-0 is not possible with this board, unless I place the RAID-0 on the Jmicron controller, and to do that, one of the HDD's would have to support e-SATA (or is e-SATA backwards compatible with plain SATA?). Kind of lame really, as I thought this was supposed to be an "enthusiast" board, and that Ez-RAID thing is much less useful to me than a sixth, non-screwy SATA port would be (I mean, who the hell decided "well, we'll give them 3 ports on one controller, then we'll split the 4th port to implement another controller and hang two ports off of that, and then we'll integrate another controller that provides 2 additional ports, but we'll force one of those to be e-SATA", especially when the predecessor board (the P5WD2) ships with a sane SATA port configuration?). I guess that leaves my options as:
1. Implement a 3-disk RAID-5, with slightly larger disks, and stick the RAID-0 on the Ez-RAID, since I was going to put my OS on that anyways. I do like the idea of being able to install my OS without having to muck with a driver disk, but I don't like the idea of now having 33% of my HDD space being wasted in the RAID instead of just 25%, nor the fact that I'd have to get less cost-effective 400 GB disks in order to hit my storage target as a result, or the potential of performance bottlenecking since the RAID-0 drives would be sharing a single SATA channel.
2. Implement the 4-disk RAID-5, and scrap the RAID-0 and just use a single HDD for the OS and program drive. Also nice in that I'd no longer have to mess with a driver disk to install the OS, but it's kind of detrimental to the purpose of building an insanely fast PC. If I wanted something to not be as fast as possible, I'd just keep using my current desktop.
3. Pick a different mainboard...this seems like the most reasonable thing, although I really like the P5W-DH's built in wireless and remote control features (and really everything but the fact that that they screwed over the RAID controllers). Especially since they come at only a $40 premium over the P5WD2, so I guess either I'll have to switch to that board (though I've heard that in that case, I'd have to be very careful about board revision), or see what offerings are around from other manufacturers.
Sigh...Asus broke my build.
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