Motherboard Raid or Controller card?

I am in the process of building a small NAS / seedbox / HTPC / whole house media streaming box and need help with raid settings and configuration. I want to put only the 5 samsung F4's in raid 5.

Here are the system specs...........
motherboard = ASUS M4A88TD-M/USB3 AM3 AMD 880G
CPU = AMD Phenom II X2 555 Black Edition Callisto 3.2GHz
Ram = CORSAIR XMS3 8GB (4 x 2GB) 240-Pin ...
SSD = Corsair Nova Series CSSD-V64GB2-BRKT 2.5" 64 GB
PSU= SILVERSTONE Strider Plus ST50F-P 500W ATX 12V
HDD = 5 X SAMSUNG Spinpoint F4 HD204UI 2TB 5400 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5"
Cooler = CORSAIR H50-1 CPU Cooler
In the bios under "Sata Configuration" it only gives me the options below.......


I want the ssd to only hold OS and not my media files and for it to be on AHCI but if I turn on AHCI it turns it on for the sata drives 1-4. If I set all six sata drives to raid is it going to make my ssd part of the pool? Do I need to buy a separate controller for the ssd or a separate controller for the raid drives or can I make it work with what I currently have?

Thanks guys

No, single drive will not be part of RAID. It will work as a single drive.

rmd3003 said:

No, single drive will not be part of RAID. It will work as a single drive.

Click to expand...

Please forgive me but I dont understand exactly what you mean. How exactly can I run it as a single drive when bios options are only for drives 1-4 and 5-6. So how would I set the ssd on sata 1 to AHCI and set sata 2-6 on raid?

After you select Raid option in mobo bios, when you boot, the Raid bios becomes available to go into, When you go into the Raid Bios, you can select which drives will be in the Raid Array. Other drives will be a single drive in AHCI mode.

Hope that helps.

guc32 said:

After you select Raid option in mobo bios, when you boot, the Raid bios becomes available to go into, When you go into the Raid Bios, you can select which drives will be in the Raid Array. Other drives will be a single drive in AHCI mode.

Hope that helps.

Click to expand...

That helps out a ton, the drives are on there way from newegg right now so I will give it a try when they come in. Thank you

I waited until they were on sale again and the egg has them right now for $75 apiece with free shipping woohooo.

I got the other drives in today and set 1-4 and 5-6 in the bios to raid. The raid bios did in fact come up and I created a raid 5 array with the 5 disk and selected to have the ssd as a single disk. Saved changes and rebooted. Now it starts loading windows and freezes on the windows animation screen then reboots. I read the asus book cover to cover and cant figure out what is going on. Any ideas?

Well after reading until my head hurt last night I gave up and emailed ASUS support this morning. I have not heard back yet but I hope it is jus my lack of experience with raid and not a hardware problem. I was able to set all the drives back to AHCI mode and windows booted fine with each drive as a single disk so I'm fairly certain it is the human element messing this setup up.

Was this an existing Windows installation? Windows does not like to switch between IDE and AHCI. So if you initially had IDE selected and you made the switch to RAID, your single drive will not be in AHCI mode. This means that Windows may not be happy. Granted, I generally get a blue screen rather than a hard lock when I do this. The way I generally fix it is a quick reload. But, someone else may have an easy way around it.

-Brian

Thank you for the reply. Yes it was an existing windows 7 installation. I thought that may have been the culprit so I put the windows 7 install disc in and rebooted and the windows install disc didn't recognize any hard drives at all. I scratched my head for a while and called a friend over to help............
Update....
He immediately said "where is the raid driver disc" to which I responded "huh, I dont have one do I" he laughed at me then put in the disc that came with the motherboard clicked browse and installed the drivers, laughed at me some more then rebooted into windows fine. I feel dumb and possibly my pride a little bruised but all is well and I now have a raid 5 array with the ssd as a single disc boot drive.