Which chipset to be used for RAID?

[geohei]

Hi.

Gigabyte GA-Z77X-UD5H

I'd like to connect two SATA2 HDDs as RAID1.

Questions:
1. Is it preferential to connect the HDDs on native Z77 or Marvell 9172 ports?
2. What about question 1. but with SATA3 HDDs?
3. Is there any difference in functionality between native Z77 or Marvell 9172 except the additional RAID levels on Z77?
4. If select RAID for the Z77, can I still use a Blue-ray drive on a Z77 SATA port, or are all connected SATA devices supposed to be HDDs used for RAID?

Thanks,

[mikeyb5753]

1.  Z77
2.  Z77

4.  you can still use devices that are not in a RAID array. 

[geohei]

3. Marvell allows stripe size and cache mode setup while Z77 doesn't allow changing any of these 2 settings. Marvell is 10-15% slower than Z77 and seems to eat up slightly more CPU resources.

[Scracy]

Marvel raid controller only operates at pclex1 speed approx 5gb/sec. If using only sata 2 drives you probably wouldnt notice much if any difference in raid  speed performance but if you were using sata 3 then z77 would be significantly faster.

[geohei]

My WD2003FYYS are SATA2 and the speed difference between Z77 and Marvell is 10-15% in favor of Z77.
I can't check with SATA3 since I don't have any SATA3 HDDs.

The reason why I tested the Marvell ports was that I was hoping to find a feature allowing 2 RAID1 HDDs to be read simultaniously, hence almost doubling the read performance on RAID1. But this is apparently not possible. Neither on Z77, nor on Marvell.

Details here: http://forum.giga-byte.co.uk/index.php/topic,11719.msg78818.html#msg78818