GA-X58A-UD3R ver2.... what raid config with 8 drives ?

[Aussie Allan]

Well after using this forum for months now to answer all my problems, I finally have to post and hope for some help in the home stretch, this one could be for you "Dark Mantis".... Windows 7-64 bit Ultimate OS Photo editing machine on water...CPU/Tri-Block/mosfets and GPU....i7-950 @4GHZ still under 68C with 24 gig of memory...no problems!...GTX-480 @925...still no problems! ....  ICH10R running "B:/ drive for storage  6x500 spinpoints raid0, getting about 425 on a 100 short stroke....not too shabby and still no problems!!!  ... Enter the Marvell raid controller connected to 2x Momentus-XT 500s under raid0 for "C:drive".    I have spent 4 weeks trying to get this retarded Wombat of a chip to work as advertised...what was Gigabyte or Marvell thinking!!!....without writing a novel matchsticks have been broken off in these two ports so I never use them again and Ive ordered a Highpoint rocketraid 640 card an hour ago ..............Question! should I just connect up the 2x500 XTs on the new raid card and leave the six spinpoints to ICH10R (onboard) or consider a different drive configuration to better utilize the new card and it's better performance?  the specs state I theoretically can connect up to 40 drives on these new cards. Read and write performance is pretty important for how I use the machine and software...image files can often exceed 6 or 7 hundred meg while processing.  Before I get my wrist slapped! Big UPS and Acronis clone and continues backup in operation 24/7... hope this is enough information, if not just ask!

 Aussie Allan in the UK

[Dark Mantis]

Hi and welcome to the Gigabyte Forum.

What on earth made you move from Oz to come here ? 

Anyway back to the problem in hand. I don't expect that you would see any benefit to moving your RAID0 to the new card as it is the drives themselves that will be the limiting factor performance wise. This is what I found with my Western Digital Black SATA3 6GB/s drives. I was expecting some huge performance boost but it was negligable.

We won't go into the Marvell fiasco! Nuff said that it impacted the whole industry not just Gigabyte.

[Aussie Allan]

  Good to finally make contact with you Mr Mantis

 The wife said Computer bits were cheaper, the food is better and everybody works a 2 day week....She has a lot to answer too! would have been far easier to cryo-freeze her dad and ship him back to OZ for defrosting!

 So leave ICH10R set alone...done!... I've also seen posts suggesting to get optimal performance is to attach each drive (XT) to the Highpoint 640 card so both Marvell chips are utilized.
 I'm really impressed with these hybrid drives, was getting about 212mb/ps (short stroke) and when I finally got the GUI interface up and not broke seek times are amazing at less then 0.4ms....the only thing I cant get working is the drives will not report there serial number back to the GUI screen log,...is this because I'm Raiding, is there any way to get this working? when the new card arrives I'm going to try Raid1 against the raid0 Ive used till now to see if there's any difference...Another small thing was I went through the process of turning ON trim support in window7 (via command prompt window) and I'm certain it is in fact "ON" as far as windows is concerned but is it in fact working

 Lastly I may bite the bullet and get one more XT drive which will give me a total of three, how would you utilise them for a C: drive

 Aussie Allan

[Dark Mantis]

Windows 7 will support TRIM automatically without any manual interferrance. There is no way to confirm that TRIM is active except by watching the HDD light. There is no other way I know of to be able to confirm that TRIM is working.

I am afraid I cannot help you with the other questions.