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Running RAID5 on Z68 across SATA 2/3

3

3nd

Junior Member
Hi I'd love some thoughts on this if you have a second.

Setup: Z68 motherboard - likely a Gigabyte GA-Z68X-UD3H.

This board has 2 SATAIII via the Z68, 4 SATAII via the Z68 (3 if the eSATA is active) and 2 SATAIII via the Marvell 88SE9172 chip.

Drive setup: 1 SATAIII SSD (system drive), 3 Seagate 2TB Green SATAIII, 2 SATA DVDs.

So the question is what is the best way to configure the drives? Obviously I want to run the Seagates in RAID5 - however since you can't RAID across Intel/Marvell, I can't take advantage of SATAIII speeds for those drives.

Will there be any noticeable difference running a SATAII RAID5 vs if I had a true SATAIII RAID5 option?

Should I put all 3 Seagates on SATAII or 2 on the SATAIII and 1 on the SATAII?

Is there any disadvantage to running the SSD System drive on the Marvell? Is there any disadvantage to running it on the same controller as the RAID?

Thanks for you advice - note this has nothing to do with Intel SmartResponse SSD Caching which will be disabled because it is a 128GB SSD.
 
so only 6 devices? I would put the SSD on the first of the Intel SATAIII ports and put the 2TB drives on the last 3 SATA II ports, and just put the DVD drives on the ports in between and just disable the other SATA controller

Don't worry about the difference of performance between SATAII and SATAIII for HDDs (SATAIII truly only matters for the fastest SSDs), HDDs simply cannot hope to saturate the bandwidth available even on SATAII for sustained transfers

As far as the Marvell controller, it will be slower than the Intel controller, I would only use those ports if more than the 6 Intel ports was needed.
 
If it was me, I'd do the following:

  • SSD on the SATAIII, as that's really the only drive that can make use of 6.0GB/s
  • Seagates on the Z68 (and you may want to add a 4th drive, should see better performance vs 3 drives)
  • SATA DVDs on the Marvell
But, if you're sure you won't add a 4th HDD to the array, then what bunnyfubbles suggests would be just fine. I agree that your Seagates won't make use of the SATA III speed.

I'm not aware of any issues if you ran the SSD on the Marvell controller, although depending on how it's connected internally it might not be as fast as the Z68 controller.
 
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