I am making heavy use of soft RAID 1 on my system. The board has Intel, ASMedia and Marvell 9230 ports, all SATA 3 + RAID, so in theory I have more choice than I need. but as everyone knows, not all are equal in speed or reliability/quality, so I don’t know how to keep good performance on it. Disks are 2 x RAID 1 mirrored HDDs, and 2 x Samsung 840 Pro 512gb, like this:
4TB + 4TB HDD (no need for any caching and no crucial data, but some heavy read-only use for huge temp database files, so must be able to rebuild mirror or check integrity after BSOD)
4TB + 4TB HDD (heavy use, must be on Intel SATA 2 port to allow Intel SSD caching)
512GB SSD (using 70 GB for caching and 350 GB for dynamic disk mirrored data)
512GB SSD (using 70 GB for OS and 350 GB for dynamic disk mirrored data)
Yeah, dynamic disks. hate it. Backup/recovery software can’t handle them, Samsung’s software can’t work with them. But I need the SSD data mirrored and I need SSD caching and OS on SSD as well, so I was running out of Intel ports… and dynamic disks let me mirror the crucial data on a disk but not all of it.
Right now my 6 disks fit on the Intel SATA ports so I get best performance. But I want to put the OS and cache on a different SSD, this allows backup and Samsung software to work and SSD data to use the entire SSD. Bonus, I don’t need to use dynamic disks.
The problem is, there are only 2 Intel SATA 3 ports and I will need one for the OS + cache. So the 2 data SSDs would need to move to a new SATA port, and benchmarking of the ASMEDIA and Marvell 9230 ports seem to show poor performance compared to the on-board Intel.
What suggestions should I consider, and if I have to use a separate RAID card rather than asmedia/marvell (so ironic for a board with 14 SATA ports!!!) what is the damage to performance?
(** I take backups also. RAID1 is so if I have a bad disk, I don’t have a 14 hour wait for 4TB of backup restore + verify)
The Intel SATA ports will give you the best performance and stability.
That is why I would connect both SSDs to the Intel SATA3 ports (the OS containing one onto the first of them).
Everything else should be tested by your own.