I haven’t built a computer in over a decade and I am currently rocking an aged Dell Inspiron 1525 laptop that I acquired for college (Many self-repairs, upgrades, shoddy hinges). Now that I have graduated and have some “disposable income” it is time for a massive upgrade. I have already purchased all the parts for an X99 build and they are on their way via various shipping services (giddy school girl *squee*). Now that my motherboard is a known, ASUS X99 Deluxe, I have come to the community and this sub-forum for some answers about my storage options.
My initial thought when I heard this mobo had 12 SATA III ports was to load up my storage with what my case could hold. My intentions were to purchase 6x4 TB WD Red HDDs to fill the drive cages and 2x1 TB 840 EVO SSDs and Velcro them to the motherboard tray. I was going to RAID 0 the SSDs and RAID 5/6 the HDDs for mass storage. My concern here is although all 12 ports are Intel chipset native they are split between two controllers, 6 apiece. With this knowledge I backed off my order from 6x to 4x on the HDDs, for now.
What I am curious about and why I am here is to ask if my original setup would work across two separate SATA controllers? Can I setup a six way RAID of HDDs on one controller and then the remaining 2 way SSD RAID on the secondary controller, or am I better off running a 4 way and a 2 way off the primary? I don’t know enough about the motherboard to know if the secondary can even do RAID at all or if the primary will support 2 different RAIDs at the same time. I hope I’ve come to the right place, can anybody enlighten this modern-un-savvy n00b?
I'm not a hardware expert, most likely someone else will give a ore definitive answer.But here is my 0.02.. Make one of your RAID arrays connect to your motherboard, and have the other one (the SSD's) be hooked up to a dedicated PCI-E raid controller card.
Personally, I recommend the 9260-4i, which can handle 2gb/s or something like that and its sata3.
That's a link to one on newegg, if you wish to overspend, but these cards can be found sub $150 range on the bay. Many reviews on this card, even Linus did one for the 9260-8i card. Here is that review.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZ-lpxDCVhQ
What's cool about these cards, is that they came out in 2010/2011? but SSD technology was still in it's walking stages :p These units were tested with arrays of donated (lent) 64gb sata2 ssd's, and now you're considering 1TB SSD's (which is crazy! lol).
The biggest con I believe with this card is the added boot times, due to the raid card having to initialize. Oh and also they ran *hot*. I have a 9260-4i sitting unused on my desk waiting to get installed one day. Alot of companies have ditched this implementation of hardware raid cards in favor of newer PCI-E SSD's.
Now I can't comment on the ASUS's raid card, if you still want to go that route I would call ASUS directly and ask, since this is a new motherboard, and honestly I've always wondered if onboard raid controllers can control two arrays.
I dont know what the case is with X99 but with Z87, there is a hardware limit of about 12 gigabit per second for the whole sata chipset. so it dosent matter if you have 3 6 gigabit or 10, 6 gigabit drives, their overall restriction is about 12 gigabit.
Now X99 more than likely has a larger sata bandwidth but the limit I currently dont know and I doubt many do. However there will be a limit.
Anyway if your looking for storage, It does not matter for HDD's, They are too large to saturate the sata bus but SSD's 3-4 High end SSD's will saturate Z87 and if you want piece of mind, Raid Card or PCIe SSD's are your best bet.