Building the best GA-X58A-UD5 system

[pszilard]

I bought the following items to build Fluffy, my newest system. Starting out with the following:

• GA-X58A SATA III mobo

• OCZ Velocity 3 120GB SSD SATA III
• Hitach 2TB 7200rpm 64MB buffer SATA III drives Qty 2
• Corsair Extreme DDR3 6GB ram
• ATI 4870 graphics card

After discovering that the SATA III performance was a straight lie, I have settled on the following configuration, for installing Windows 7 Pro 64bit.

• Put the two 2TB drives in RAID 0 on the Marvel ports and use them for data and internal backup
• Put the SSD on the Intel controller using AHCI, in the hope that random access will be faster that the HDDs, and install Windows and Apps here
• Use Shadow Protect to backup the SSD to the internal RAID 0, which is then copied to a 20TB ReadyNAS PRO
• Use SyncBack Pro to backup the RAID 0 files every night to the NAS box
• * Will monitor to see if I need to add another 6GB ram and/or upgrade the graphics card

My usage is non-gaming, photo and video editing and web site dev. Oh, and I am driving a 27" Dell monitor.

Any comments welcome...

[Dark Mantis]

Hi

Your RAID0 array will fall over if you leave it connected to the Marvell 9128 controlled ports as the Marvell chip is a dingo's doo doo.

The fastest ports on your board are the INtel ICH10R southbridge contolled ports SATA2_0 and SATA2_1. I would move the array over to them for speed and safety.

[pszilard]

I have found that the RAID 0 array seems to big for W7 to use, even when trying to create multiple partitions, It only allows about 2TB to use and the remaining section can't be partitioned.

So I had changed to RAID 1 instead. The RAID 0 access speed was 200MB/sec whereas the RAID 1 gives me 160BM/sec - go figure!

[Aussie Allan]

 If you configure and load OS under GDP instead of NTFS........... your larger drive array will be recognized

  Aussie Allan

[Dark Mantis]

Yes I would go with Allan on that one. To use a drive bigger than 2 TB you must format it with GPT to be recognised.

[pszilard]

Can you give a pointer on GPT? What utility do I need to use it, do I need to download a driver, etc? Thanks guys...

[Aussie Allan]

      pszilard

     The MBR stands for Master Boot Record and GPT stands for GUID Partition Table. The Master Boot Record record cannot reference more than 2TB of drive space. Although the limit of the GPT is still not known , ....Window7 has no problems reading the GPT boot loader so yes, GPT is a bootable partition format for you

  When loading the OS, you get to a point where you will be asked Do you want to install on this partition (drive) instead of clicking yes/go....click format drive.......this will give you the option you're after of NTFS or GPT file partition format.........enjoy

  Aussie Allan

[pszilard]

Thanks Allan. I saw the GUID partition on my Mac laptop, but I thought that Windows couldn't read that. I appreciate your help, thanks again.