Thanks for the responses Dahak & BonzaiDuck
As you can tell I am a Nube. What I should has ask is what is the best way to set up my SSD and HHD. What I want is fast overall performance with progarm load and file access. I am not a gamer but may want to with my grandkids. My main reason for builing this PC was to have system that would take advantage of the lastest technology. I wanted also the experience and knowledge gained from doing it yourself My main uses will be Photo shop, video editing, heavy home office and Internet use. My thought on RAID0 was to mirror all my data for recovery in case of disk failure. I experienced this and lost some unreplacable data. Can this also be done with all progams and system data load on "C" ? Thanks
If it's "mirroring," then I think you'd want to use a RAID1 configuration instead.
When you said "grand-kids," I can see we're on a similar wavelength, even if you think you're a "noob."
I've been thoughtful about the "reliability" vs performance angle for a long time. It probably affects my utility bill. We'd had about six (6) two-drive RAID0 configurations (striping versus mirroring) in my fam-damn-ily since about 2004. My sis-in-law's RAID0 went south because she started fiddling with the Promise BIOS and RAID settings. My brother (her hubby) brought his P4 system with RAID0 to me thinking something similar happened, but it was an incorrect video driver installation that made the system fail to boot, and I recovered it.
Since '07, I've had this four-drive RAID5 array on what is no longer my main workstation. Bought extra hard-drives to put in storage should a drive fail, but none ever did. Figure the power consumption was higher for running four disks and the controller 24/7. And the RAID5 performance -- using a 3Ware-AMCC 9650SE card -- wasn't all that great: The best sequential read-rate was below 150 MB/s and the sequential write-rate just above 200 MB/s.
In my view, you have a really great "mid-range" mobo there with some "high-range" features. That's the board I have.
For a few months, I'd been running an Intel Elm Crest SATA-III SSD for caching an SATA-III HDD. Glitches, cache corruption or SDD controller errors (shown as "iastor" in the Win System Log) would arise every week or so. This may have arisen from either using the SSD as both cache and formatted partition (it's a 120 GB SSD), maybe a need for a firmware upgrade -- I don't rightly know . . . BUT!!! . . . .
I replaced it two weeks ago with a Patriot Pyro 60GB SATA-III SSD, caching a VelociRaptor HDD. It is absolutely stellar!!
You may be able to get a Pyro for about $75 -- I paid about $99 for mine, and there's currently an new rebate program afoot on these at NewEgg.
But I wouldn't invest heavily in SSD's to use them directly as boot disks -- capacities too small, $/GB too high. If you RAID0 a pair of SSDs, you might get throughput of close to 900 MB/s. If you use an SSD like the Pyro to cache a single HDD, you may achieve a sequential read-rate of close to 400 MB/s. That's almost 3x the SATA_III VelociRaptor's sustained throughput of 145 MB/s!! You'd never notice the difference between 900 MB/s and 400 Mb/s.
Further -- it wouldn't matter if the HDD were a VelociRaptor or a mainstream $55 HDD -- because the performance gain would still be closer to the SSD standalone figures than it would to the HDD's standalone performance.
ANNNDDD FUR-THER! It shouldn't matter if the HDD is (either SATA-II or III) connected to an SATA-II controller port if the SSD is an SATA_III (with speeds like the Pyro) connected to an SATA-III port.
Then you have the prospects of multi-monitor graphics, Quick-Sync and Lucid Virtu with your on-board Intel graphics and any discrete graphics card you care to add to the system.
Finally, you should be able to use ISRT with a RAID1 setup of two HDDs. I'd guess that you'd get approx the same performance as you would with a single HDD accelerated under ISRT.
I may not have an accurate understanding yet of your configuration, but those are my two cents about what you can do with that motherboard. . .
