ASUS P8Z68 setup advice

[MinPins]

I am building my new P8Z68 MOBO based PC and have a question about the SATA port configuration.

My OS (Win7 Pro 64bit) drive is a Mushkin Chronos Deluxe 120GB SATA III SSD and my data drives will be two Seagate 3TB 7200RPM 64MB HDDs paired in RAID1 for data integrity. I will also have a SATA BDR drive.

Only two of the SATA MOBO ports are Intel 6Gb/s, the other four Intel SATA ports are 3Gb/s. In addition there are two Marvell 6Gb/s ports.

My plan is to connect the HDDs to the Intel 6Gb/s ports in RAID1 and the SSD to one of the Marvell 6Gb/s ports. The BDR drive would be connected to one of the Intel 3Gb/s ports.

Do you agree? Else would you only utilize the Intel ports? Why?
Thanks.

 

[Forceman]

I would swap that around and put the SSD on the Intel 6GB port (the Marvell ports are not good for SSDs) and then just put the RAID on the Intel SATA 3GB ports. You don't need the HDDs on a 6GB port (especially in RAID 1).

 

[MinPins]

I considered doing just that but thought that the combination of RAID1 + 3Gb/s ports would really slow down the HDD transfer speeds. These HDDs are 6Gb/s models.

 

[Magnite]

That's just marketing, unless they are SSD or maybe SAS drives, they will never use the full 6 GB/s. I have 2 SSDs on my Sata6 ports, then 2 WD Caviar Blacks in Raid 1 on the first two Sata3, then another Samsung F3 and a Samsung DVDRW on the remaining pair. I have the marvell controller disabled.