Gigabyte X58A-UD5 RAID 0 Help!

[mkohman]

Hey Guys,

I have a Gigabyte X58A-UD5 MOBO which I am happy with running the latest Bios version .. I know this board only supports SATA 2 .. However I recently purchased a ASUS U3S6 PCI card which has 2 x SATA 3 connections and I also purchased 2 x KINGSTON SSDNOW V+200 SATA 3 hdd in the hope of Raid 0 them to have an ultra fast operating system ..

Now the issue is I believe that the motherboard does not detect the 2 x Kingston SATA 3 SSD drive on the Raid setup as it doesn't look for any hard drives on the PCI Slots in Bios.. Is this correct?

Is there a way I can Raid 0 my 2 x SSD SATA 3 drives on the Asus U3S6 PCI Card or will I be better off Raid 0 them on the motherboards SATA 2 ports .. Also will there be any benefit to Raid 0 both the drives over using just one drive on the Motherboards Sata 2 connection?

Many Thanks..

 

[LexLuthor]

First things first..
If you put a SATAIII SSD into a SATAII port, you'll have a reduction on the actual speeds (depending on the max speeds reported by your SSD's manufacturer) because SATAII max speeds is 300MB/s, while SATAIII has a 600MB/s rate speed..
So, if your SSD has more speed tha 300MB/s, it will only work as fast as the interface you plug into..

Second, about RAIDing, well, there are encountered opinions on this matter.. If you ask me, go for it..

Third, I really never used a SATA controller card, so maybe you should check with the manufacturer's manual to see how it's properly configured.. But, it should be recognized by your mobo, in first instances.. So if this isn't happening, something's wrong...
Maybe you should check if your drives are listed into the Drives section of your Bios, or try to load the RAID utility and see if it shows them??.. I really don't know much about a controller card.. Maybe a missing driver???...

Best regards..

 

[Bomag]

The UD5 has three on board controllers Intel, Marvell 6GBs and a gigabyte branded controller. When using a pair of Vertex 3 Max IOPS on my UD5 the best results were from the Intel ports. Although the limited bandwidth hit benchmark scores for sequential read/writes the random scores were much better (which what normally counts for running windows).

If you want to run the Asus card you may want to turn of the on-board Marvell or gsata ports to free up space on the bios for the boot block on the Asus card (i.e. it show up during the boot process). Given the Asus card is PCI-E 4x it will be faster than the addition on-board ports which are limited to PCI_E 1x