Motherboard Controller RAID Arrays

A_Reed · August 31, 2014

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 LTT 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?

SMURG · August 31, 2014

Depends on the controller. I'm gonna imagine you have an Intel one, so you'll be able to do Matrix RAID with that (I've used it in the past for RAID 0, had no problems with it), then if your other controller (Marvell maybe?) can do RAID too you could make the other array with that.

I'm not 100% sure, but I don't think the Intel Matrix RAID supports multiple arrays on the same controller. I could be wrong though.

Cohacq · August 31, 2014

Raid 5/6 on the mobo is going to be reaaaaally slow. You're probably better off with a raid card.

wpirobotbuilder · August 31, 2014

I doubt the onboard chipsets will support RAID 6. RAID 5 will be very slow on an onboard controller, I recommend RAID 10 instead, unless you really need lots of storage space.

Secondary controllers tend to support only RAID 0/1/10 (depending on the board and controller). If you must have RAID 5, you will have to use your primary controller for the hard drive RAID, and boot from the secondary. If you can deal with a RAID 10 with the drives, then you can boot off the primary and have your drives on the secondary.